No abstract

This paper provides a typological overview of expletive negation based on a survey of 722 languages, focusing in detail on a smaller sample of five languages. Expletive negation (EN) has been discussed extensively within Romance linguistics. This paper surveys its occurrence across languages of the world and offers a comprehensive list of EN-triggering contexts collected from French and Mandarin, comparing that list with EN triggers in Januubi, English, and Zarma-Sonrai. The paper proposes a language production and semantic account of the similarity of EN-triggering contexts found in these five languages. We propose that the meaning of EN triggers entails or strongly implies ¬p and that the activation of ¬p alongside p is what leads speakers to produce EN. Four semantic licensing conditions for EN triggers are identified and each EN-triggering context is semantically analyzed.

Expletive negation refers to constructions where a negator in the complement of certain lexical items does not change the polarity of the complement proposition. Jin & Koenig (2021) show that expletive negation occurs rather widely in languages of the world and in very similar environments. They propose a language production model of why such apparently illogical uses of negation arise in language after language. But their study does not address the grammatical status and representation of expletive negation. In this paper, we argue that expletive negation is part of the lexical knowledge speakers have of their language and that the negator in expletive negation constructions contributes a negation to a non-at-issue content associated with expletive negation triggers. We provide a Lexical Resource Semantics analysis of how triggers combine in a non-standard manner with the standard semantic content of their complements: the negation (and in some cases an additional modal operator) of the content of their complement is part of the trigger’s non-at-issue content while the scope of the negation is an argument of the trigger’s MAIN content. Finally, we suggest that the expletive use of the French negator ne includes a lexical constraint that requires it to modify a verb that reverse selects for an expletive negation trigger.