Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap

Abstract

Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as the news anchor didn’t warn nobody about the floods (meaning “the news anchor warned nobody”), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as the news anchor didn’t warn anybody about the floods, are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in “Standard” or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors. To explore this question, and the relationship between NC and NPI constructions, we compared the acceptability of overtly negative noun phrases (e.g., nobody), NPIs (e.g., anybody), and bare plurals (e.g., people), in negative contexts and in conditionals. Negative items were followed by a consequence which supported their single negative meaning, while conditional items were followed by a consequence compatible with the NPI and the bare plural but not the negative noun phrase. Acceptability ratings of the critical NC sentences were reliably lower than constructions with NPIs and bare plurals, but the consequences for all three of these sentence types were rated highly. This reflects an asymmetry in participants’ acceptance of NC and their readiness to interpret it in context. A follow-up study with only conditionals revealed that speakers can also find NPIs infelicitous in conditional contexts with consequences that are compatible with a negative interpretation of the NPI, and that negative arguments are felicitous in these same contexts. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that speakers who do not accept NC have grammars that generate both NC and NPI constructions, and further, that these speakers have two underlying structures for any-NPIs in English.

Nobody Doesn’t Like Negative Concord

“…The three nonce verbs were "jeck", 6 More specifically, Standard English speakers have been shown to accept both NC and DN readings in their language, as a function of the syntactic, pragmatic and intonational properties of the relevant sentence. For example, adult English speakers are more likely to accept NC interpretations for sentences where the negative marker scopes above the negative indefinite (e.g., 'John didn't call nobody') than for sentences where the negative indefinite has wide scope (e.g., 'Nobody didn't call') (Blanchette 2019). 7 All experimental hypotheses, predictions, and analyses, were preregistered.…”

“…However, recent experimental results suggest that speakers of Standard English can consistently generate both double negation and negative concord interpretations for sentences with multiple negative expressions (Blanchette 2017 ; Blanchette et al. 2018 ; Blanchette 2019 ). 6 Some researchers have used this evidence to support the idea that Standard English is in fact an inherently negative concord language and that the apparent preference for double negation is due to sociolinguistic factors (Blanchette 2015 ); for others, these facts have been instead taken to suggest that Standard English is a double negation language which shows some concord behavior (Zeijlstra 2004 ).…”

On the prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

“…Here as well, the empirical picture appears more complex than previously described, with some strict NC languages failing to license DN readings entirely, and others allowing them under distinct conditions. Similarly, while NC readings have long been claimed to be unavailable in standard English, recent experimental evidence has shown that they occur quite readily (Déprez 2014;Blanchette & Lukyanenko 2019a;b). These authors argued that NC readings must be part of the grammar of American English, since speakers can assess constraints on their grammaticality independently of whether they acknowledge using them in their own idiolects.…”

“…Or on the contrary, should DN readings be considered as largely irrelevant to the grammar of NC languages, if as Espinal & Prieto (2011) have argued, they are pragmatically-triggered non-compositionally inferable outputs of denial mechanisms akin to metalinguistic negation (Horn 1989)? Related questions also arise about NC readings in DN languages (Zeijlstra 2010;Blanchette & Lukyanenko 2019a). Answers to these questions bear on the validity of syntactic models of negative dependencies that take DN and NC as consequences of syntactic macro-parametric options, or on the contrary, defend that they are both languageinternal options permitted by the grammar (Déprez 2000;de Swart & Sag 2002;de Swart 2009;Iordachioaia 2009;Déprez 2011).…”

Adaptation at the Syntax–Semantics Interface: Evidence From a Vernacular Structure

“…At its core is the relationship between the subject and the auxiliary, which occur in an order that is non-canonical in both standardized and vernacular Englishes. Two further descriptive characteristics of NAI are that the auxiliary must be negated (e.g., Parrott, 2000;White-Sustaíta, 2010), and the negation appears as the clitic n't as opposed to the marker not (Blanchette, 2015;Matyiku, 2017;Parrott, 2000;Salmon, 2018). Labov et al (1968) and Labov (1972) observed NAI use by vernacular African American and Latinx speakers in New York, and it has also been observed in White Alabama English (Feagin, 1979), West Texas English (Foreman, 1999(Foreman, , 2001Matyiku, 2017), Vernacular Texas English (Salmon, 2018), African American English (Green, 2002(Green, , 2014Parrott, 2000;Sells et al, 1996;Weldon, 1994), and Appalachian English (Montgomery, 2004;Montgomery & Hall, 2004;Tortora & den Dikken, 2010;Wolfram & Christian, 1976).…”