Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.
This paper explores ‘expletive’ uses of the negative marker pas in Québec French (QF) (Kemp 1982, Larriv´ee 1996), which despite checking every diagnostic for expletive negation (ExN), do not pattern with previously documented cases of ExN. We show that most previous accounts of ExN can thus not explain ExN pas’s distribution. Building on van der Wouden’s (1994) approach to ExN as negative polarity items (NPIs), and adopting an alternative-based account of NPIs (Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998, Chierchia 2013, a.o.), wepropose a preliminary analysis of ExN pas as part of a ‘complex’ NPI. That is, ExN pasrealizes one of two pieces in the composition of an NPI: (i) it does not contribute existential quantification of its own, but (ii) requires that the predicative existential expression it co-occurs with activate a set of domain alternatives. Though this analysis stands out in making a number of correct predictions about the distribution of ExN pas, it faces an empirical challenge, which we ultimately leave as an issue for future work.
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