Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites

Lukyanenko

2019

Lang. cogn.

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This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the ‘she answered nothing’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types.

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 68%

Unacceptable grammars? an eye-tracking study of English negative concord

Lukyanenko

2019

Lang. cogn.

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“…Taken together, these acceptability judgment results suggest that the position of the marker -n't relative to the negative phrase plays a crucial role in both the acceptability and interpretation of sentences with two negations as either NC or DN, in Standard English. Blanchette & Nadeu (2018) further show that American English speakers generate both single and double negation readings of negative words used as responses to negative yes/no questions in an experiment design similar to Espinal & Prieto's (2011) study of Catalan. Crucially for our purposes, their results demonstrate that single and double negation readings are reliably distinguished via acoustic cues.…”

Section: Negative Concord In Standard English Testing the Limits Ofsupporting

confidence: 56%

“…In the 2Q condition ( Fig. 5), there is a significant difference on the second syllable of subject no one, but in the reverse direction: DN is distinguished from NC in being marked by significantly higher fundamental frequency, in a manner similar to but less pronounced than the findings in Blanchette & Nadeu (2018). Figure 6 illustrates an acoustic cue associated with a meaning difference in the Object condition, namely, the duration of the stressed syllable in nothing relative to the whole word, compared across pragmatic conditions (and with the single negative control, e.g., Ronnie will love nothing at the restaurant).…”

Section: Perception Task Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…We hypothesized that speakers whose grammars allow NC would reliably use the prosodic cues associated with this reading, while speakers whose grammars only allow DN would not. On the basis of Blanchette and Nadeu's (2018) results, we further hypothesized that DN readings would be prosodically marked relative to NC, possibly by higher f0.…”

Section: Research Questions and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Nadeu²,

Yeaton

et al. 2018

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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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.

“…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).…”

Section: English Negative Concord and Negative Polaritymentioning

confidence: 80%

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

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.