Negative Concord in English

Blanchette, Frances

doi:10.1075/lv.13.1.01bla

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Thirdly, negative concord is widespread in nonstandard Englishes and even speakers who use it near-categorically can style-shift to another variant (Labov 1972a: 806). In contrast, double negation is rare and may require an additional focus operator on the indefinite (Biberauer and Roberts 2011;Blanchette 2013). Negative concord therefore appears to be part of the grammar of English but is not realised in standard varieties because of external standardisation pressures (Weiß 2002: 138;Blanchette 2013).…”

Section: The Syntax Of Negation With Indefinites In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ambiguity of constructions such as John would be happy with no job (from Rochemont 1978: 73) follows from Account 2 if we assume that the negative DP moves to NegP for sentential scope under the reading that there is no job with which John would be happy (sentential negation), but does not move under the reading that John would be happy if he did not have a job (constituent negation). Under Account 1, this is not straightforwardly captured and would likely require an additional focus operator as mentioned earlier in relation to double negation (Biberauer and Roberts 2011;Blanchette 2013).…”

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Childs

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper integrates syntactic theory and variationist analysis in an investigation of the variation between English not-negation (I don't have any money), no-negation (I have no money) and negative concord (I don't have no money). Using corpora of three varieties of UK English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford respectively, I test two theoretical accounts of the variation. Account 1 applies Zeijlstra's (2004) agreement-based theory of negative concord to all three variants, such that n-words (e.g. nobody) which feature in no-negation and negative concord are not inherently negative but agree with a negative operator in a higher NegP. Under Account 2, no-negation is instead derived via negative-marking within the DP followed by movement to the higher NegP for sentential scope (Kayne 1998; Svenonius 2002; Zeijlstra 2011). These accounts, together with observations about the raising properties of functional versus lexical verbs, lead to the formulation of different hypotheses about the distribution of variants in speech according to verb type, verb phrase complexity, and the discourse status of the propositions expressed. Results of distributional analysis and mixed-effects modelling support Account 2 of the variation over Account 1, suggesting structural identity between not-negation and negative concord (in contrast to no-negation). This supports Tubau's (2016) proposal that English negative indefinites have two distinct structures: one in which negation is marked syntactically in the DP and one in which they agree with a syntactically-higher NegP.

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Section: The Syntax Of Negation With Indefinites In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Childs

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…One possible answer to this question would point to sociolinguistic factors, such as a social stigma, which some people may associate with negative concord sentences (cf. Nevalainen2006;Horn2010).Indeed, Blanchette(2013;2015)proposesthatStandard English is inherently a negative concord language and observes that sociolinguistic factors maycontributetotheabsenceofnegativeconcordsentencesbyspeakersofthisdialect.…”

Section: Negation In the Grammar Of Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two negations for the price of one

Thornton

Notley

Moscati

et al. 2016

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Standard English is typically described as a double negation language. In double negation languages, each negative marker contributes independent semantic force. Two negations in the same clause usually cancel each other out, resulting in an affirmative sentence. Other dialects of English permit negative concord. In negative concord sentences, the two negative markers yield a single semantic negation. This paper explores how English-speaking children interpret sentences with more than one negative element, in order to assess whether their early grammar allows negative concord. According to Zeijlstra's (2004) typological generalization, if a language has a negative syntactic head, it will be a negative concord language. Since Standard English is often analysed as having a negative head, it represents an apparent exception to Zeijlstra's generalization. This raises the intriguing possibility that initially, children recognize that English has a negative head (i.e., n't) and, therefore, assign negative concord interpretations to sentences with two negations, despite the absence of evidence for this interpretation in the adult input. The present study investigated this possibility in a comprehension study with 20 3-to 5-year-old children and a control group of 15 adults. The test sentences were presented in contexts that made them amenable to either a double negation or a negative concord interpretation. As expected, the adult participants assigned the double negation interpretation of the test sentences the majority of the time. In contrast, the child participants assigned the alternative, negative concord interpretation the majority of the time. Children must jettison the negative concord interpretation of sentences with two negative markers, and acquire a double negation interpretation. We propose that the requisite positive evidence is the appearance of negative expressions like nothing in object position. Because such expressions exert semantic force without a second negation, this informs children that they are acquiring a double negation language.

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“…An alternative analysis would be to follow the proposal byTortora (2009Tortora ( , 2012 andBlanchette (2012Blanchette ( , 2013 based on the notion of Feature Spreading.…”

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confidence: 98%

Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: more on the DP/NP analysis

Cyrino

Espinal

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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In this paper we claim that Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese come in two shapes. Real BNs, by which we mean bare count nouns not specified for number and definiteness, correspond to NPs that can only occur as objects of a reduced class of predicates (namely, those that express a HAVE-relation) and are interpreted as property-type expressions. Other BNs can be definite and, although not morphophonologically specified for number, they are DPs with null Determiners morphosyntactically specified for Number features and are interpreted as entity-type expressions. We base our analysis on the distribution and meaning of BNs, by comparing BrP with other Romance languages, mainly (Old and Modern) French on the one hand, and Spanish and Catalan on the other.

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Negative Concord in English

Cited by 17 publications

References 0 publications

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Two negations for the price of one

Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese: more on the DP/NP analysis

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