Chapter 3. French negative concord and discord

Déprez, Viviane; Yeaton, Jeremy

doi:10.1075/rllt.14.03dep

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Déprez (2011) proposes instead that the distinction is more of a “micro-parametric” one, in which grammars may generate either NC or DN, depending on the syntactic configuration. This “micro-parametric” view is supported by recent experimental work, which has shown that in English as well as in Romance languages, DN constructions as in (6) exist alongside NC constructions as in (7), with DN being reliably associated with a marked prosodic tune relative to the single negation interpretation of NC (Espinal and Prieto, 2011; Espinal et al, 2016; Blanchette et al, 2018; Blanchette and Nadeu, 2018; Déprez and Yeaton, 2018).…”

Section: English Negative Concord and Negative Polaritymentioning

confidence: 80%

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

Blanchette

Lukyanenko

2019

Front. Psychol.

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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.

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Section: English Negative Concord and Negative Polaritymentioning

confidence: 80%

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

Blanchette

Lukyanenko

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…But, in striking contrast with the Spanish (36), which is interpreted as a single negation (‘Negative Spread’), its French counterpart in (37) is ambiguous between a single or double negation, that is between (38a) and (38b) (Corblin 1996, Muller 1991, de Swart and Sag 2002, a.o.). (As usual, the double negation reading has special prosodic properties; see Déprez 2018 and Yeaton 2018.)…”

Section: Negative Concordmentioning

confidence: 88%

On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

Herburger

2023

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.

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A register approach to negative concord versus negative polarity items in English

Rotter,

Liu

2024

Linguistics

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Negative concord (NC) is used in many English varieties but usually considered ungrammatical in ‘standard’ contemporary English, where negative polarity items (NPIs) are used. In this paper, we take a novel experimental approach to the use of NC versus NPI constructions, in relation to register, sets of speech repertoires linked to specific situational and functional parameters. We report on two rating experiments with American and British English participants using interlocutor relations as a formality manipulation. Results show that (i) across both samples, NC constructions were rated as less appropriate than NPI associates, and (ii) there was a register effect in the American English data in that NC was rated less appropriate in formal than informal contexts. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for the register-sensitivity of NC constructions in American English.

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Chapter 3. French negative concord and discord

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

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

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

On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

A register approach to negative concord versus negative polarity items in English

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