Micro-syntactic variation in American English Negative Concord

Abstract

This paper presents a series of quantitative gradient acceptability judgment studies of English negative sentences. Adult native speakers of American English recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk were asked to rate sentences on a scale of 1 to 7 on the basis of their naturalness. The main study compares sentences with the marker n't and either a negative object (e.g. 'John didn't eat nothing') or a negative subject in canonical position ('nobody didn't eat'). Each sentence type has two possible interpretations, one in which the two negatives contribute a single semantic negation, the so-called Negative Concord reading, and another in which the two negations yield a semantic Double Negation logically equivalent to an affirmative. While mean acceptability ratings were below the median for all items, statistical analyses of the gradient data revealed that speakers prefer Negative Concord over Double Negation readings for sentences with negative objects. To rule out a processing explanation for the preference for negative objects over sentence initial negatives, a follow-up study tested the acceptability of sentences with a single negative subject or object and no negative marker. This revealed a preference for subjects, suggesting that the object preference in the two negatives study is a true grammatical effect. A third study revealed that Double Negation constructions are unacceptable overall even in explicit denial contexts, and a fourth study added Negative Auxiliary Inversion constructions (e.g. 'Didn't nobody eat'), to compare three types of Negative Concord. The results of all four studies are argued to reveal an English grammar that generates both Negative Concord and Double Negation, and in which Negative Concord is generated despite its unacceptability and reported absence in usage.

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.…”

“…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 :…”

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

“…In sum, in conjunction with the results in Blanchette (2017), our data suggest that in the case of English negative sentences, low acceptability ratings observed only in binary or ternary terms obscure properties of a grammatical system. The idea of grammatical yet unrealized structures is not novel, and was first proposed by Barbiers (2009), in the context of a large-scale survey of dialect variation in Dutch.…”

“…In our interpretation of the English data in Blanchette (2017) and those reported here, it appears that for Standard English speakers, it is not the case that "ungrammatical" sentences are nevertheless being interpreted reliably, but rather, that unacceptable sentences may display specific patterns of grammaticality. The acceptability judgment data show that binary acceptability obscures reliable syntactic preferences, which appear to reflect some underlying competence on the part of the speakers.…”

“…Under this hypothesis, and under the definition of Standard English employed here, speakers who do not accept or report using NC should nevertheless display grammatical knowledge of it. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence in Blanchette (2017), in a series of gradient acceptability studies of English sentences with two negatives. Her results demonstrate that Standard English speakers reliably distinguish between NC structures, and even prefer them over DN in certain syntactic configurations.…”