On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites

Zeijlstra, Hedde

doi:10.1007/s10828-011-9043-2

Cited by 51 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…Account 1 extended Zeijlstra's (2004) Agree theory of negative concord to apply to all three variants such that (i) not-negation contains a negative marker in NegP with [ineg]; (ii) no-negation arises due to Agree between a covert negative operator in NegP that has [ineg] and a post-verbal indefinite DP with [uneg]; and (iii) negative concord is the result of Agree between the negative marker with [ineg] and indefinite DPs with [uneg]. Under Account 2, not-negation and negative concord are derived in the same way as in Account 1, but no-negation is instead the result of negative-marking within the DP which subsequently moves to the higher NegP for sentential scope (based on Kayne 1998;Svenonius 2002;Zeijlstra 2011).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Haegeman 1995;Watanabe 2004;Wallage 2017: 185) or composed of a negative operator plus an indefinite (e.g. Zeijlstra 2011;Penka 2012;Tubau 2016). Either of these DP structures are tenable for Account 2 and this does not matter for the purposes of my analysis (see Iatridou and Sichel 2011: 610-12), as the crucial property of no-negation in this account is that negation is marked syntactically within the DP.…”

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Under Account 2, no-negation is the result of syntactic negation within the indefinite DP, followed by movement to the sentential NegP projection (Kayne 1998;Svenonius 2002;Zeijlstra 2011). 7 These negative DPs could be considered inherentlynegative quantifiers (e.g.…”

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under Account 1, the three variants have the same underlying structure featuring a negative marker/operator in NegP with which the n-words in no-negation and negative concord agree (by extending Zeijlstra 2004). Account 2 posits a different structure for no-negation, where negation is marked inside the post-verbal indefinite DP and moves to NegP for sentential scope (based on Kayne 1998;Svenonius 2002;Zeijlstra 2011). With appeal to standard assumptions that be and (optionally) have raise for tense and agreement while 1 Contrary to some studies which use the term "any-negation" (Harvey 2013;Childs et al 2015;under review; Burnett and Tagliamonte 2016a;b), I use the term "not-negation" (see also Tottie 1991a;b;Varela Pérez 2014;Wallage 2015;2017) so that the name of each variant refers to its type of negative marking.…”

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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: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

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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“…Within the so-called decompositional approach it is said that split-scope effects result from lexical decomposition of the negative indefinite into a separate negation and an existential. Scholars differ whether this decomposition is the result of amalgamation (Jacobs 1980), incorporation (Rullmann 1995), syntactic agreement (Penka 2010) or a post-syntactic spell-out rule (Zeijlstra 2011).…”

Section: Negated Indefinitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not a light negation

Zeijlstra¹

2015

SALT

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In languages like Dutch and German, certain instances of negation, such as negated indefinites, are ruled out in out-of-the-blue contexts, i.e. with the unmarked reading where negation outscopes an unfocussed indefinite (*Er kann nicht eine Fremdsprache. 'He speaks not a foreign language.'). Such instances are, however, fine in NPI licensing contexts. Schwarz (2004) and Schwarz & Bhatt (2006) argue that in such cases the negative marker is not a plain negation, but rather a homophonous marker of light negation, which they take to be an NPI. In this paper I argue, though, that this phenomenon can be explained by adopting standard pragmatic assumptions. In short, I argue that such instances of negation are bad due to the existence of some alternative expression that only conveys the unmarked reading. In the example above, the alternative expression contains a negative indefinite: Er kann keine Fremdsparache. ('He speaks no foreign language.'). Uttering a less simple construction, such as the example above with the negated indefinite, will give rise to an implicature that states that the speaker does not intend such utterances with their unmarked readings, since the unmarked reading could have been conveyed in a simpler manner. This implicature, then, is suppressed in NPI licensing contexts.

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The Landscape of Negative Dependencies: Negative Concord and N‐Words

Giannakidou

Zeijlstra

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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This chapter updates an earlier discussion of n‐words and negative concord (NC) offered by the first author. Our goal here is to address the considerable developments in the area of n‐words and NC that took place since 2006. As the title suggests, we study negative dependencies within the context of negative dependencies. We have chosen this term as a theory‐neutral way to refer to phenomena that in one way or another involve dependency of an expression on the presence of negation. Several major negative dependencies can be distinguished; negative polarity, NC, negative quantifiers in Germanic languages, and even the expression of negation itself have been discussed in this context. Negative dependencies form a landscape: they share a space as grammatical phenomena, for instance sensitivity to the presence of negation – but, at the same time, the dependencies are not identical. For instance, the need for negation of a negative polarity item such as any does not derive from the same source as the need of negation for an n‐word, which has a more narrow distribution than any . And within the class of n‐words (the main focus of this chapter) there is considerable variation as well. Our approach is inspired by a long tradition of polarity research that acknowledges diversity and the fact that polarity phenomena are lexically driven. In presenting the phenomena, we apply a compositional perspective by connecting the nature of the sensitivity to the morphosyntactic, semantic, or pragmatic properties of the negation‐sensitive items.

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On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites

Cited by 51 publications

References 19 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

Not a light negation

The Landscape of Negative Dependencies: Negative Concord and N‐Words

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