Mismatches in the interpretation of fragment negative expressions in Mandarin Chinese

Li, Feifei; Borràs-Comes, Joan; Espinal, M. Teresa

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2019.07.017

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…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).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…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).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…Such avoidance manifested itself for 9. in the answer of 1 informant who suggested "in the wilderness" for "in the middle of nowhere", which however due to influence from English has a literal translation "keskellä ei-mittään" used by all other informants. The double negation cases in 4. and 10. gave way to two translations and one metalinguistic comment indicating a Negative Concord reading of the original; of those who understood the double negation reading, 3 offered metalinguistic comments regarding the difficulty to translate, 2 others avoided "nothing" altogether, 1 transformed "write nothing" by unambiguously local scope expression "without writing", and 5 directly provided the positive version of (4) (for a similar strategy of producing the equivalent positive sentence in double negative contexts, see Li, Borràs Comes & Espinal 2019).…”

Section: A Psi Set In Finnishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning negative: micro-steps from negative polarity item to negative-word

Larrivée

2021

Language Sciences

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On the interpretation of response particles méi(yǒu) and bù to negative polar questions in Mandarin Chinese

Borràs-Comes²,

Espinal³

2022

Journal of Pragmatics

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Mismatches in the interpretation of fragment negative expressions in Mandarin Chinese

Cited by 4 publications

References 38 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

Turning negative: micro-steps from negative polarity item to negative-word

On the interpretation of response particles méi(yǒu) and bù to negative polar questions in Mandarin Chinese

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