The Markedness of Double Negation

Larrivée, Pierre

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_8

Cited by 55 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…We have thus offered a correlation between the fact that bouletic modality never scopes below negation, and hence alternatives are not available at that level, and the fact that no metalinguistic reading is available. Confirming what was discussed in Puskás (2012) and Larrivée (2016), we have evidence for the fact that metalinguistic negation is dependent on the availability of contrasting material. Since contrasting material is syntactically encoded in focus, the availability of metalinguistic negation interpretations is conditioned by a syntactic constraint.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Sue invited thalia (not Tina) (v) by (i) to (iv), and following Larrivée (2016) and Puskás (2012) who also give arguments to the fact that contrast marking is the MLN inference trigger, I will conclude that what enables to have access to MLN readings is the contrast (stress) marking on some element of the sentence.…”

Section: The Syntax Of Metalinguistic Negationmentioning

confidence: 74%

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To wish or not to wish: Modality and (metalinguistic) negation

Puskás

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper examines the interaction between negation and some expressions of bouletic modality. Whereas most other types of modals may scope below negation, expressions of bouletic modality in the form of hortative and optative markers never do. The distribution of high adverbials, as well as co-occurrence possibilities with a negative head, such as French ne, reveal that hortatives and optatives do not target the same position: they occupy two different heads within the left peripheral structure. However, it is argued that the syntax of the bouletic operator, which is analyzed as involving high left-peripheral positions, prevents the negative marker from syntactically and semantically scoping over it. This is shown to also correlate with access to metalinguistic negation interpretations. While with the adequate context, the bouletic operators examined here are compatible with metalinguistic negation, no wide scope interpretation above the bouletic modal content is accessible. This is exactly the contexts in which the negative head is syntactically banned. It is proposed that these observations constitute evidence for the fact that metalinguistic negation requires specific syntactic conditions, namely access to a high contrast-related position. Metalinguistic negation is obviously triggered by contextual input, but, at least in the cases examined here, is not blind to syntax.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: The Syntax Of Metalinguistic Negationmentioning

confidence: 74%

To wish or not to wish: Modality and (metalinguistic) negation

Puskás

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…This is not surprising considering that the pragmatic function of double negation is to contradict or correct a previous negative statement (Horn, 1991; Puskás, 2012), and thus, double negatives are subject to restricted pragmatic licensing conditions. As described in the introduction, double negatives have been found to appear in specific information structure configurations (Larrivée, 2016) and to be signaled by certain prosodic cues such as contradictory contour (Espinal and Prieto, 2011; Prieto et al, 2013). In addition, this investigation provides evidence that native speakers display strong processing disruptions when double negation dependencies are encountered in isolation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…For instance, it has been found that the use of specific contradictory intonational contour and denial gesture features are crucial for the felicitous interpretation of double negation dependencies in oral comprehension tasks (Espinal and Prieto, 2011; Prieto et al, 2013). In written format, a corpus study by Larrivée (2016) described that double negation dependencies are generally triggered in restricted information-structure configurations in which a discourse-old negative statement is being denied by the second negation. Due to its complexity, double negation dependencies are assumed to engage in greater processing cost than negative concord dependencies or single negation (Corblin, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable

Flores

2019

Front. Psychol.

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This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g., ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative adverb never (e.g., The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences were studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (Experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (Experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights into the complexity of multiple negations and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability.

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“…"Nobody drinks nothing"), meaning "Nobody drinks anything" Corblin (1995). analyses the second instance of negation to be "parasitic" on the first and argues that negative concord is enforced during processing by a constraint that serves to limit derivational complexity (see alsoLarrivée, 2016).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quadruplex negatio invertit? The on-line processing of depth charge sentences

Paape¹,

Vasishth²,

Malsburg³

2019

Preprint

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So-called "depth charge" sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field (Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.

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The Markedness of Double Negation

Cited by 55 publications

References 25 publications

To wish or not to wish: Modality and (metalinguistic) negation

To wish or not to wish: Modality and (metalinguistic) negation

Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable

Quadruplex negatio invertit? The on-line processing of depth charge sentences

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