Tests for the Quantificational Force of Negative Indefinites

Penka, Doris

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567263.003.0007

Cited by 3 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…This follows directly from the claim that NC-terms are, on one of their readings, NPIs, which are also not restricted to expressions of particular syntactic categories. The cross-categorial parallel that we see between NC-terms and NPIs is more difficult to explain in analyses that treat Negative Concord and NPI licensing as separate phenomena (e.g., Zeijlstra 2004, Penka 2011).…”

Section: Negative Concordmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Since such a narrow scope construal is not often feasible, examples of postverbal NC-terms without a higher negation or NC-term are not numerous. This, however, does not mean that they are not productive and thus should be set aside as idioms (see Penka 2011).…”

Section: Negative Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 12 This section builds on the analysis of Negative Concord in Herburger (2001, 2003). There are of course numerous other accounts, including Laka (1994), Zanuttini (1997), Haegeman and Zanuttini (1991), Ladusaw (1992), Giannakidou (1998), Déprez (1997), de Swart and Sag (2002), Zeijlstra (2004), Penka (2011) and Chierchia (2013). …”

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confidence: 99%

“… 13 No silent negation or self-licensing is needed in this account of Negative Concord (see Ladusaw 1992, Laka 1994, Zeijlstra 2004, Penka 2011). This is theoretically advantageous, as silent negation or self-licensing has to be posited for the cases where NC-terms receive negative interpretation, without independent evidence for its existence elsewhere.…”

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confidence: 99%

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On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

Herburger

2023

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.

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Section: Negative Concordmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Negative Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

Herburger

2023

Can. J. Linguist.

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“… 3. The term ‘negative indefinite’ is used, following Penka (2007), in a descriptive manner to refer both to negative quantifiers, such as nobody or nothing in English (viz. niemand and niks , respectively, in Afrikaans), and to the so-called ‘n-words’, a term first coined by Laka (1990) for the indefinite pronouns that participate in negation in negative concord languages.…”

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confidence: 99%

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

2022

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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinforced by proponents of the standardisation of Afrikaans who prescriptively imposed a negative concord structure onto the Dutch negation system. The Afrikaans negation system is therefore argued to be artificially created, making it crosslinguistically rare and syntactically complex, the latter possibly having a delaying effect on acquisition. This study investigates both the comprehension and production of negation by young child speakers of Afrikaans. Sentences containing negative indefinites (NIs) ( niks ‘nothing’ and geen ‘no’/ ‘none’ with a final negative particle) are compared with those containing two negative particles (referred to as SN), which are syntactically less complex. We examined (1) whether the comprehension of sentences with NIs is more difficult to acquire than that of sentences using SN and (2) when and how negation is produced by young children. Data were collected through a picture selection task (comprehension) and recordings of spontaneous speech during free play (production). Results show that the comprehension of SN was acquired before that of NI, indicating that sentences containing NIs were indeed more difficult to comprehend than those containing SN. The production data showed that even the youngest participants (age 3;0) could produce grammatically well-formed negated constructions, but that errors occurred until age 4;3. In comparison with that found for other West Germanic languages, Afrikaans’ complex system of expressing negation seems to have a delaying effect on the comprehension of negation, specifically NIs, but not on production.

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Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

2023

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The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses and wh-questions, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce undercompression errors (a type of commission errors) that are predicted by the Meaning First Approach. We also summarize data that children’s comprehension ability provides evidence for the Meaning First Approach prediction that decompression should be challenging, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.

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Tests for the Quantificational Force of Negative Indefinites

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

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