Fragment answers and double negation in strict negative concord languages

Fălăuş, Anamaria; Nicolae, Andreea C.

doi:10.3765/salt.v26i0.3813

Cited by 35 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Our findings about Basque provide evidence that what is called Strict NC is not uniform across languages. That is, some Strict NC languages allow DN (like Romanian; Falaus and Nicolae, 2016), while others, like Basque, clearly do not. Thus, one must separate the notion of Strict NC from obligatory single negation interpretation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Etxeberria¹,

Tubau

Déprez

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult’s grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See Falaus and Nicolae (2016) for the suggestion that DN is also possible in Romanian NDEs used as fragment answers to negative questions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Etxeberria¹,

Tubau

Déprez

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…This is because they are able to reconstruct to their original (i.e. base) position at the interpretive level (Fălăuş and Nicolae, 2016). However, this is obviously not the case for NPIs.…”

Section: Appearing Preverballymentioning

confidence: 98%

Negative sensitive items in Turkish: Negative polarity or negative concord?

Görgülü

2020

RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi

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This paper is concerned with the nature of negative sensitive items such as hiçkimse 'no one' and asla 'never' in Turkish. It is well attested in previous studies that these negative sensitive elements require the obligatory presence of sentential negation or some other licensor in the structure.However, there is still an ongoing controversy as to what these negative sensitive elements actually are and why they behave the way they do. Some researchers proposed that these elements are negative polarity items (NPIs) whereas others suggested that they are (existential) n-words or negative concord items (NCIs). Therefore, the question remains as to which category these elements belong to in the language. In this work, I address this question by using a comprehensive set of diagnostic tests proposed in prior work to find out the true characteristic of these elements. I argue that their syntactic and semantic behavior strongly indicate that they should be classified as NCIs, and not as NPIs in Turkish. I also show that these negative sensitive items display the characteristics of both the universal quantifier and the existential quantifier. This is because they can be interpreted either way in the language. This finding is compatible with the cross-linguistic predictions that NCIs are able to display the behavior of different quantificational elements across languages.

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“…B: *Any big ones. (intended: I didn't catch any big ones) Fălăus and Nicolae (2016) develop this analysis further in order to capture the surprising fact that, in strict negative concord languages, NCI fragment answers can convey a double negation (DN) reading if used in response to a negative question (see chapter 14), even though their putative sentential sources only allow for a single negation/negative concord (NC) reading.…”

Section: Negative Concord Items and Negative Polarity Items As Fragmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[Romanian, Fălăus and If we suppose, with Fălăus and Nicolae (2016), that the insertion of a covert negation operator is only possible in cases where sentential negation is unavailable (e.g. in elliptical cases), that rules out a double negation reading for a case like ( 26), but allows for covert negation to be insertedoptionally 7in the elliptical context in (25).…”

Section: Negative Concord Items and Negative Polarity Items As Fragmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Fragment Answers

Weir

2020

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

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This chapter discusses the interaction of negation with fragment answers. The ability to use negative concord items as fragment answers has been taken as evidence of their having an inherent negative force; this chapter considers positions for and against this view, and what kind of assumptions (for the licensing of NCIs and/or for the interpretation of elliptical structure in fragments) would be required on each view, as well as considering the implications of double-negation readings for NCI fragments, and the availability of NPI fragments. The chapter also investigates the cooccurrence of a negator with a fragment answer (as in Who ate the cake?—Not John, anyway), exploring what ramifications such structures have for the syntax of fragments, and in particular for the choice between sententialist (elliptical) and non-sententialist analyses of fragments.

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Fragment answers and double negation in strict negative concord languages

Cited by 35 publications

References 18 publications

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

Negative sensitive items in Turkish: Negative polarity or negative concord?

Negative Fragment Answers

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