Negative Concord in English and Romance

Negative Concord in English and Romance PDF Author: Susagna Tubau Muntañá
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Negative Concord in English and Romance

Negative Concord in English and Romance PDF Author: Susagna Tubau Muntañá
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Negation and Negative Concord

Negation and Negative Concord PDF Author: Viviane Déprez
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263159
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

Negative Concord: A Hundred Years On

Negative Concord: A Hundred Years On PDF Author: Johan van der Auwera
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111202275
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?

The Expression of Negation

The Expression of Negation PDF Author: Laurence R. Horn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110219298
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

The Loss of Negative Concord in Standard English

The Loss of Negative Concord in Standard English PDF Author: Amel Kallel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443828157
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The loss of Negative Concord (NC) has long been attributed to external factors. This study readdresses this issue and provides evidence of the failure of certain external factors to account for the observed decline and ultimate disappearance of NC in Standard English. A detailed study of negation in Late Middle and Early Modern English reveals that the process of the decline of NC was a case of a natural change, preceded by a period of variation manifested in the obtained S-curves for all the contexts studied. Variation existed not only on the level of the speech community as a whole but also within individual speakers (contra Lightfoot, 1991). A close study of n-indefinites in negative contexts and their ultimate replacement with Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in a number of grammatical environments shows that the decline of NC follows the same pattern across contexts in a form of parallel curvature, which indicates that the loss of NC is a natural process. However, this study reveals that the decline is not constant across time and thus the Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch, 1989) does not, in that respect, fully account for this change. Context behaviour suggests an alternative principle of linguistic change, the Context Constancy Principle. A Context Constancy Effect is obtained across all contexts indicating that the loss of NC is triggered by a change in a single underlying parameter setting. Accordingly, a theory-internal explanation is suggested. N-words underwent a lexical reanalysis whereby they acquired a new grammatical feature [+Neg] and were thus reinterpreted as negative quantifiers, rather than NPIs. This lexical reanalysis was triggered by the ambiguous status of n-words between [±Neg] and thus between single and double negative meanings. This change is treated as a case of parameter resetting as this lexical reanalysis affected a whole set of lexical items and can thus economically account for the different observed surface changes.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation PDF Author: Viviane Déprez
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198830521
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
This volume offers reviews of cross-linguistic research on the major classic issues in negation, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume will be an essential reference on the topic of negation for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1999

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1999 PDF Author: Yves d'. Hulst
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027237298
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This volume brings together a selection of articles presented at 'Going Romance' 1999. The articles focus on current syntactic and semantic issues in various Romance languages, including Catalan, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number of Northern Italian dialects. A large number of articles focus on negation, which was the theme of the workshop at Going Romance 1999, but other topics investigated include "Wh- in situ," free relatives, exclamatives, lexical decomposition and thematic structure, unaccusative inversion, and temporal existential constructions. Most articles are comparative in nature, relating the different syntactic and semantic properties of both Romance and non-Romance languages to principles of Universal Grammar. The theoretical frameworks adopted in the various articles are diverse, ranging from the Principles and Parameters framework to HPSG.

Sentential Negation and Negative Concord

Sentential Negation and Negative Concord PDF Author: Hedzer Hugo Zeijlstra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dutch language
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description


Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics

Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics PDF Author: Julie Auger
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588115980
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This collection of twenty articles, selected from the 33rd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at Indiana University in 2003, presents current theoretical approaches to a variety of issues in Romance linguistics. Invited speakers Luigi Burzio and Jose Ignacio Hualde contribute papers on the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of Italian verbal inflection and comparative/diachronic Romance intonation, respectively. The other papers, whose authors include both well-known researchers and younger scholars, represent such areas as French syntax (both synchronic and diachronic), second language acquisition (Spanish & English), Spanish intonation, phonology, syntax, and semantics, Italian semantics, Romanian morphology and syntax, Catalan phonology and morphology, and Galician phonology (two papers). The volume is rounded out by three explicitly comparative studies, one on proto-Romance phonology, one on microvariation in Romance syntax, and a third addressing syntactic microvariation among varieties of French and French-based creoles. Frameworks represented include Optimality Theory, Minimalism, and Construction Grammar.

Expression and Interpretation of Negation

Expression and Interpretation of Negation PDF Author: Henriëtte de Swart
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048131634
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This study in cross-linguistic semantics deploys the framework of bi-directional Optimality Theory to develop a typology of the relationship between syntax and semantics in negation markers and negation indefinites.