Double Negatives, Negative Polarity and Negative Incorporation in Romance: A Historical and Comparative View1

Posner, Rebecca

doi:10.1111/j.1467-968x.1984.tb01207.x

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…7 Santome is a language with strict NC (Zeijlstra 2004). The obligatory co-occurrence of the standard negation marker with these N-words is the pattern found in many languages, such as Old Romance (Martins 1997(Martins , 2000, Modern Rumanian (Posner 1984), Serbo-Croatian (Progovac 1994) and most creole languages, as was first noted by Bickerton (1981). However, differently from, for instance, Old Romance (Martins 1997(Martins , 2000, the items licensed by standard negation in Santome do not behave like weak negative polarity items (see Hagemeijer 2007 for discussion).…”

Section: The Properties Of Neg1 and Neg2mentioning

confidence: 60%

Double-headed negation in Santome

Hagemeijer

2008

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

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Santome, a Portuguese-related creole spoken on the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, exhibits a standard discontinuous sentence negation pattern consisting of a preverbal marker (Neg1) and a VP-final marker (Neg2). It will be shown (i) that both markers are heads of independent NegPs and (ii) that the VP-final marker is sensitive to the distinction between arguments and adjuncts and, within the latter, peripheral and non-peripheral adjuncts. I will challenge previous analyses of languages that exhibit bipartite negation for which it is claimed that Neg2 projects higher in the structure than Neg1 by proposing that Neg2 heads a NegP that sits lower in the structure than the NegP hosting the preverbal marker.

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Section: The Properties Of Neg1 and Neg2mentioning

confidence: 60%

Double-headed negation in Santome

Hagemeijer

2008

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

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“…An interesting property of the above examples is the obligatory cooccurrence of the standard negation marker with these negative quantifiers, even when the negative quantifier precedes . This is actually the pattern found in many languages, such as Old Romance (Martins 1997(Martins , 2001), modern Rumanian (Posner 1984), Serbo-Croatian (Progovac 1994) or Haitian Creole (DeGraff 1993;Déprez 1999). Martins (1997Martins ( , 2001 shows that in Old Romance the items licensed by standard negation are weak negative polarity items (NPI's) because they are often found in non-negative modal environments.…”

Section: Negative Quantifiersmentioning

confidence: 60%

Aspects of discontinuous negation in Santome

Hagemeijer¹

2009

Typological Studies in Language

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This paper provides an overview of the expression of negation in Santome, one of the four Portuguese-based creole languages spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, focusing especially on its standard discontinuous sentence negation pattern. It will be shown that the distribution of the final negation marker is strongly related to complementation and adjunction, thereby providing evidence for the syntactic position of the negation markers in the clause. Other topics addressed are the negation cycle in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, negative concord and minimizers, and negative coordination.

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“…While his observation hints at the special behavior of nu in this environment, it gives the erroneous impression that nu is never final with pa 'so that, in order to'. As demonstrated by the following example from my recordings, the presence of a purpose clause does not always entail the shifting of nu out of its final position: 54) For a historical and comparative view of negative polarity items in Romance see Posner (1984). 55) This "empty" negative particle is generally not redundant at an early stage in the language.…”

Section: ) Pronounced [Aora] [Ara] [Aoa]mentioning

confidence: 90%

Negation in Palenquero

Schwegler

1991

JPCL

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A conspicuous feature of Palenquero (P) morphosyntax is the unusual, though by no means unique, often clause-final or sentence-final placement of the predicate negator nu 'not ', e.g., i [NU] kelé bae aya NU 'I don't want to go there'. Previous descriptions, often cited in the literature, present oversimplified (and, therefore, misleading) accounts of the data. This paper attempts to rectify the descriptions found in Bickerton & Escalante [B&E] (1970), Lewis (1970), Friedemann & Patino Rosselli [F&P] (1983), andMegenney (1986).Based on an extensive corpus of informal spoken data, it is demonstrated that Palenqueros (Ps) systematically use not one but two basic creole negation patterns -preverbal and postverbal nu -and that the selection of construction signals important discourse pragmatic information. The study goes beyond earlier accounts by providing evidence that the syntax of postverbal nu is not, as generally claimed, utterance-final. The frequent placement of this negator at the end of a clause or sentence depends rather on the absence of constructions which occur infrequently. Such facts, together with the argument that a preverbal negation strategy cannot be viewed as a simple case of interference from Spanish (S), show that, contrary to the opinion of previous investigators, P negation exhibits virtually no signs of decreolization. 1.168 ARMIN SCHWEGLER Granda (1978:414-5), and seemingly also Byrne (1987:2) consider that, prior to the recent intensive contact with the outside world, slow convergence with S over the past three centuries has led to a post-creole continuum. Del Castillo (1984:88) and F&P (1983:185) reject this analysis, arguing (justifiably) that the current situation in San Basilio is still one of diglossia. 3 Lipski & Schwegler (forthcoming) suggest that three factors in particular have distorted research findings: (1) insufficient fluency in P on the part of the investigators, (2) excessive reliance on information obtained from P informants now residing in the (more hospitable) neighboring urban centers of Cartagena or Barranquilla, and (3) the accepted but erroneous belief that the speech modality found in the lumbalú -the ancestral funeral song still practiced today (Schwegler forthcoming b and e) -preserves an unusually heavy dose of unanalyzable African elements that must have characterized the early colonial speech of Ps. What is even more damaging to any study of this creole is the failure by researchers to draw attention to the frequent, often extremely rapid, and, therefore, admittedly not always easy to detect code-switching that takes place in free, uninterrupted conversations among fully bilingual Ps. 4 Lack of attention to such switching operations, as well as insufficient knowledge of either speech variety found in Palenque, has often led to false analyses of certain features (e.g., negation, as argued below), and brought about the hypervaluation of supposed interferences between S and P. 5 These points suggest the fundamental insufficiency of P studies when dealing ...

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Double Negatives, Negative Polarity and Negative Incorporation in Romance: A Historical and Comparative View1

Cited by 15 publications

References 6 publications

Double-headed negation in Santome

Double-headed negation in Santome

Aspects of discontinuous negation in Santome

Negation in Palenquero

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