The morpho-syntax of negation and the positions of NegP in the Finno-Ugric languages

Mitchell, Erika J.

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2004.08.005

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…There is thus historical precedent and potential dialectal evidence for a negative auxiliary in Estonian. Second, Estonian is the only language among its closest relatives where the negative auxiliary fails to inflect Mitchell 2006). As we have seen, it inflects in Finnish, but it also inflects in the Finnic languages Ingrian, Karelian, Livonian, Veps, and Vod.…”

Section: Ei As a Morphologically Deficient Negative Auxiliarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian

Norris¹

2016

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Estonian negated indicative clauses show no agreement, whereas Estonian negated imperative clauses show agreement twice: once on the main verb and once on the negation word ära. This contrasts with affirmative clauses, where agreement appears only once. I propose a unified syntax for agreement across these clausal types, arguing that the there is one head which bears a ϕ-feature probe in all Estonian sentences. There is no agreement in negated indicatives because this head has only one suitable vocabulary item in this context: ei. Doubled agreement arises due to a rule of postsyntactic Feature Copying in imperative contexts. I argue that this analysis is superior to an analysis making use of multiple ϕ-feature probes in the syntax, as such analyses struggle to account for the optionality of doubling in first-person plural contexts. The proposed analysis makes predictions about the kinds of marking possible in negated imperatives, which appear to be borne out in related Uralic languages. This investigation supports a view of the morphosyntax of agreement whereby the syntax and morphology of agreement overlap but do not coincide.

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Section: Ei As a Morphologically Deficient Negative Auxiliarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian

Norris¹

2016

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“…Mitchell (2006) argues that the negative auxiliary in Finnish is a syntactic head for three reasons: 1) The negative auxiliary shows agreement with the subject, and subject-verb agreement is typically assumed to express a specifi er-head relationship, 2) the presence of the negative auxiliary blocks the expression of subject agreement on the lexical verb, suggesting that the negative auxiliary intervenes in a head position between the lexical verb and the phrase where subject-verb agreement takes place in line with the Head Movement Constraint, and 3) the negative auxiliary can move to C° and merge with the complementizer että 'that' as in (8). (8) Kerro-Ø-n ett-e-t puhu-Ø ranska.…”

Section: Negation In Finnishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

Vikner¹,

Jørgensen²,

Gelderen³

2016

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“…In this book, we will not take negative verbs as in (7) into account, but focus on negation particles and negative indefinites. Compare Mitchell (2006) for a recent study of negative verbs in FinnoUgric languages. In this section, we discuss negation particles.…”

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Expression and Interpretation of Negation

Swart

2010

Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory

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Chapter summaryThis chapter introduces the empirical scope of our study on the expression and interpretation of negation in natural language. We start with some background notions on negation in logic and language, and continue with a discussion of more linguistic issues concerning negation at the syntax-semantics interface. We zoom in on crosslinguistic variation, both in a synchronic perspective (typology) and in a diachronic perspective (language change). Besides expressions of propositional negation, this book analyzes the form and interpretation of indefinites in the scope of negation. This raises the issue of negative polarity and its relation to negative concord. We present the main facts, criteria, and proposals developed in the literature on this topic. The chapter closes with an overview of the book. We use Optimality Theory to account for the syntax and semantics of negation in a cross-linguistic perspective. This theoretical framework is introduced in Chapter 2. Negation in logic and languageThe main aim of this book is to provide an account of the patterns of negation we find in natural language. The expression and interpretation of negation in natural language has long fascinated philosophers, logicians, and linguists. Horn's (1989) Natural history of negation opens with the following statement: "All human systems of communication contain a representation of negation. No animal communication system includes negative utterances, and consequently, none possesses a means for assigning truth value, for lying, for irony, or for coping with false or contradictory statements." A bit further on the first page, Horn states: "Despite the simplicity of the one-place connective of propositional logic (¬p is true if and only if p is not true) and of the laws of inference in which it participate (e.g. the Law of Double Negation: from ¬¬p infer p, and vice versa), the form and function of negative statements in ordinary Chapter 1 2 language are far from simple and transparent. In particular, the absolute symmetry definable between affirmative and negative propositions in logic is not reflected by a comparable symmetry in language structure and language use." The scope of this book is more modest than Horn's seminal study, but we will nevertheless attempt to work out some of the issues highlighted by Horn. In particular, we will be concerned with negation as a universal category of human language, with negation as the marked member of the pair , and with cross-linguistic variation in the marking and interpretation of propositional negation and negative indefinites. Markedness of negationThe fact that all human languages establish a distinction between affirmative and negative statements is the starting point of the investigation in Chapters 3 through 6.The relation with animal communication systems is investigated in Chapter 7, where we draw implications for language genesis from our study of negation in L2 acquisition. Modern studies on animal communication make it possible to assign a ment...

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The morpho-syntax of negation and the positions of NegP in the Finno-Ugric languages

Cited by 12 publications

References 9 publications

Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian

Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian

Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

Expression and Interpretation of Negation

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