The Oxford Handbook of Negation

Abstract

<p>In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax–semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.</p>

Expletiveness in grammar and beyond

“…NCIs can be claimed to have an at-issue/truth-conditional contribution, whereas we here argue that expletives make no at-issue contribution to a proposition but may constrain one of the speech act layers. See Déprez and Espinal (2020) for an updated review of different types of negative dependencies. on a predicate incorporating negation, such as the fear-predicate (Espinal 1992;Horn 2010;Giannakidou & Mari 2020;Moeschler 2020).…”