The sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is often presented as a verbal illusion. According to the standard view, this sentence, which seems perfectly acceptable at first sight, is in fact logically incorrect. It is usually assumed that sentences such as these are produced as the result of negation overload, but get a coherent interpretation because of shallow processing, and because of pragmatic factors, which overrule semantics and syntax. In this paper it is argued that this analysis is incorrect and that No head injury is too trivial to be ignored can be seen as an instance of the negative ‘No X is too Z to Y’ construction, which is a sub-construction of the abstract ‘No X is too Y to Z’ construction. This negative construction can be seen as a conventionalized construction (form-meaning unit) that has a transparent (i.e. linguistically analyzable) syntactic structure that can be linked to and motivated by other constructions. It is shown that the occurrence of negative ‘No X is too Z to Y’ construction has to do with the rhetorical function of the infinitival verb in these sentences, and the need to express particular information by a form-meaning element. This study stresses the importance of the rhetorical dimension of constructions.

Abstract

The concepts of excess (`too') and sufficiency (`enough') and their expressions are studied crosslinguistically. An examination of these concepts across 59 languages shows that a distinction must be made between dedicated marking of excess and sufficiency and contextually determined interpretations of other meanings (including various degree meanings). It is argued that the concepts of excess and sufficiency are inherently associated with the concept of goal-directedness. This is reflected in the way these concepts are encoded and used across languages and in the difference between the construction of excess and sufficiency and resultative degree constructions.

This paper presents a cross-linguistic typology of performatives, especially with respect to their relationship with tense and aspect, in the languages of the world. I explore the relationship between performatives and particular tenses and aspects, and touch on the mechanisms underlying such a relationship. The paper finds that there is not one relation between performatives and a particular tense and aspect and there are no languages which have a special (dedicated) performative tense or aspect marker. Instead, performatives are compatible with various tense and aspect markers, even though the use of a present tense seems to be the most common. What counts as the most optimal tense and aspect for performatives depends on the division of labor within the linguistic structure.

No abstract