English negative concord and double negation: The division of labor between syntax and pragmatics

Abstract

Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single semantic one (e.g., the ‘I ate nothing’ reading of “I didn’t eat nothing”), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. ‘It is not the case that I ate nothing’). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports micro-parametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation.

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

“…Regarding the asymmetry between NC acceptability and felicity, we note that this finding both supports and complements previous work which compared NC with DN, its truth conditional opposite (Blanchette, 2017; Blanchette et al, 2018; Blanchette and Lukyanenko, 2019). In these studies, preceding context was employed to elicit an NC or a DN reading for sentences a subset of which were parallel to the critical sentences presented here.…”

“…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).…”

“…While vernacular English varieties are known for instantiating NC (Wolfram and Fasold, 1974; Nevalainen, 2006), a series of recent experimental studies show that SE speakers also have reliable intuitions about this construction type. The studies show that SE speakers have a clear knowledge of the syntactic distribution of NC (Blanchette, 2017), an understanding of its meaning and prosodic properties in relation to DN (Blanchette et al, 2018), and an apparent proclivity toward building NC structures during online processing (Blanchette and Lukyanenko, 2019). These studies all involve comparison of sentences with a negative noun phrase in direct object position following a negative marker as in (11) (and (6/7) above), and sentences with a negative noun phrase in canonical subject position preceding a negative marker, as in (12) 6 ,7 :…”

“…21Previous studies have similarly elicited two separate responses of a different nature for a single item. See for example, Blanchette et al (2018) and Li et al (2019).…”

Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable

“…Putting the evidence from these previous studies together, it appears that instances of double negation seem to present parsing difficulties when there are not explicit pragmatic cues that help predict the double negative dependency. Along these lines, Blanchette (2013, see also Blanchette et al, 2018) maintains that speakers of Standard English tend to interpret instances of double negation as negative concord dependencies when they are encountered in the absence of the relevant cues. This claim is also supported by experimental evidence provided by Thornton et al (2016), showing that young children acquiring Standard English initially perceive double negation configurations as forming negative concord dependencies.…”