Abstract
Is Double Negation (DN) a marked interpretation with respect to Negative Concord (NC) as universally assumed? This is what is verified in this article that reports on actual usage in French and English. It investigates three configurations with multiple clause-mate negative expressions (clausal negator with a n-word, two n-words, and two clausal negators). The data is analysed for the relative proportion of NC and DN readings, and for identifiable triggers of DN. The predictions if DN is marked are that NC as a default should occur even in contexts biased for DN, and that specific collocations and contextual factors trigger DN readings. Current work leads to the expectation that the determinant factor for DN is an Information Structure (IS) configuration, in which the rejected negative clause is old information explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context and the rejecting negator is discourse-new. Both predictions are supported by the data: contexts biased in favour of DN still display NC interpretations in up to half of the corpus occurrences; and DN is strongly correlated to the expected IS structure (up to 84 %), and in other cases to recurrent collocations (up to 46 %). The findings demonstrate that DN is marked as the result not of a macro-parameter, but of a psycholinguistic bias that favours NC as a default interpretation for negative dependencies due to greater ease of processing, in line with recent psycholinguistic results.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A reviewer however notes that “a parallel reading, involving neither concord nor double negation, seems possible with conjunction. Whereas Nobody did nothing might be seen as equivalent to nobody did anything in a NC reading, and to Everybody did something in a DN reading, the sentence I want no dogs and no cats can neither mean I want no dogs and any cats, nor I want every dog and some cat(s). A standard interpretation involving intersection or union of generalized quantifiers (à la Keenan and Faltz 1985, or any other Montagovian approach) correctly predicts that the two negative quantifiers do not cancel out, and do not require a special reading for one of the negative quantifiers (as in NC) either.”
- 2.
Patrick Duffley correctly identifies (21) and (22) as displaying non-prescriptive features. My point is that NC readings of clause-mate negatives in either English or French cannot be explained away by relegating them exclusively to regional dialects known only to some speakers: the data suggests that speakers of these languages are able to produce and understand clause-mate negatives with a NC reading (see the evidence in Blanchette 2013). This of course is what is expected if NC is unmarked for psycholinguistic reasons as discussed below. The vehement denial of this ability by some speaker is a testimony to the strenght of prescriptive exhortations in communities with a normative tradition (Haspelmath 1997: Sect. 8.2).
- 3.
One would want this observation to receive an explanation. I speculate that there are two probable reasons for English preference for DN in modal environments: they make partition of the discourse-new negator and the discourse-old negative proposition easier to compute as the discourse-old negative can be related to the infinitive verb; such a partition can also be helped by the tendency of modals to range over alternative events, including non-realisation, thus facilitating parsing of double negatives. The demonstration of either of these speculations sadly goes beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 4.
Non-categorical association is expected according to a reviewer because we are dealing with pragmatic matters, which would only be related to grammatical tendencies. I could not disagree more. I have established in Larrivée (2011) that some marked negatives are categorically used with discourse-old propositions, and that once this categorical association is lost, the negative either becomes a default or disappears.
References
Amaral, P., & Varnadoe-Russ, K. (2013). An experimental approach to Levinson’s M-based implicatures. Paper presented at CIL, 22–27 July, Geneva.
Biberauer, T., & Roberts, I. (2011). Negative words and related expressions: A new perspective on some familiar puzzles. In P. Larrivée & R. Ingham (Eds.), The evolution of negation. Beyond the Jespersen cycle (pp. 23–59). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.
Blanchette, F. (2013). Negative Concord in English. Linguistic Variation, 13(1), 1–47.
Chen, L., Li, X., & Yang, Y. (2012). Focus, newness and their combination: Processing of information structure in discourse. PLoS ONE, 7(8), e42533.
Corblin, F. (1994a). Sémantique des négatifs multiples. In P. Attal (Ed.), La négation: Actes du colloque de Paris X—Nanterre, 12-13-14 novembre 1992 (pp. 279–298). Linx, special issue 29.
Corblin, F. (1994b). Le traitement des complexes négatifs en DRT. In Actes du Colloque ECCOS ’92 (pp. 157–175).
Corblin, F. (1994c). Multiple negation processing. Human Communication Research Centre. Report 62.
Corblin, F. (1996). Multiple negation processing in natural language. Theoria, 62(3), 214–259.
Corblin, F., Déprez, V., de Swart, H., & Tovena, L. (2004). Negative Concord. In F. Corblin & H. de Swart (Eds.), Handbook of French semantics (pp. 417–452). Stanford: CSLI.
Corblin, F., & Derzhanski, I. (1997). Multiple negation, optional arguments and the reification of eventualities. In F. Corblin, D. Godard, & J.-M. Marandin (Eds.), Empirical issues in formal syntax and semantics: Selected papers from the Colloque de syntaxe et de sémantique de Paris 1995 (pp. 219–242). Bern: Peter Lang.
Corblin, F., & Tovena, L. (2001). On the multiple expression of negation in romance. In Y. D’Hulst, J. Rooryck, & J. Schroten (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 1999 (pp. 87–115). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
de Swart, H. (2010). Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology. Dordrecht: Springer.
de Swart, H., & Fonville, R. (2014). Double negatives and intonation in Dutch. In G. Dicky & H. Jack (Eds.), Black book: A Festschrift for Frans Zwarts (pp. 86–100). Groningen: CLCG.
Déprez, V. (1999). The roots of negative concord in French and French based creoles. In D. Michel (Ed.), Language creation and language change: Creole, diachrony and development (pp. 375–428). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Déprez, V. (2000). Parallel (a)symmetries and the internal structure of negative expressions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 18(2), 253–342.
Dryer, M. S. (1996). Focus, pragmatic presupposition, and activated propositions. Journal of Pragmatics, 26(4), 475–523.
Espinal, M. T., & Prieto, P. (2011). Toward constraining double negation. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(1), 2392–2410.
Espinal, M. T., Tubau, S., Borràs-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2016, this volume). Double negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction between syntax and prosody. In P. Larrivée & C. Lee (Eds.), Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives (pp. 145–176). Cham: Springer.
Falaus, A. (2007a). Double negation and negative concord: The Romanian puzzle. In J. Camacho & V. Déprez (Eds.), Romance linguistics 2006 (pp. 135–148). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Falaus, A. (2007b). Le paradoxe de la double négation dans une langue à concordance négative stricte. In F. Floricic (Ed.), La négation dans les langues romanes (pp. 75–97). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Giannakidou, A. (2007). N-words and negative concord. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax (pp. 327–391). London: Blackwell.
Gundel, J. K., & Fretheim, T. (1993). Topic and focus. In G. Ward & L. R. Horn (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 175–196). London: Blackwell.
Haspelmath, M. (1997). Indefinite pronouns. New York: Oxford University Press.
Horn, L. R. (1991). Duplex negatio affirmat…: The economy of double negation. CLS, 27(2), 80–106.
Horn, L. R. (2001). A natural history of negation. Stanford: CSLI.
Horn, L. R. (2010). Multiple negation in English and other languages. In L. R. Horn (Ed.), The expression of negation (pp. 111–148). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Huddlestone, K. (2010). Negative indefinites in Afrikaans. Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University.
Jespersen, O. (1917). Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Høst.
Krahmer, E., Swerts, M., Theune, M., & Weegels, M. (2002). The dual of denial: Two uses of disconfirmations in dialogue and their prosodic correlates. Speech Communication, 36(1–2), 133–145.
Krifka, M. (2007). Basic notions of information structure. In C. Féry & M. Krifka (Eds.), Interdisciplinary studies of information structure (Vol. 6, pp. 13–56). Potsdam.
Larrivée, P. (2004). L’association négative. Depuis la syntaxe jusqu’à l’interprétation. Geneva: Droz.
Larrivée, P. (2011). The role of pragmatics for grammatical change: The case of French preverbal non. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(7), 1987–1996.
Larrivée, P. (2012). Positive polarity, negation, activated propositions. Linguistics, 50(4), 869–900.
Larrivée, P. (2014). The continuity of the vernacular. The evolution of negative doubling in French. In M.-B. M. Hansen & J. Visconti (Eds.), The Diachrony of negation (pp. 237–257). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Moscati, V. (2006). The scope of negation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florence.
Muller, C. (1984). L’association négative. Langue Française, 62, 59–94.
Muller, C. (2005). Portée et phrases négatives à modifieurs adverbiaux multiples. Questions de classification en linguistique: méthodes et descriptions. In I. Choi-Jonin, M. Bras, A. Dagnac, & M. Rouquier (Eds.), Mélanges offerts au Professeur Christian Molinier (pp. 241–262). Bern: Peter Lang.
Payne, J. R. (1985). Negation. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (pp. 197–242). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prieto, P., Borràs-Comes, J., Tubau, S., & Espinal, M. T. (2013). Prosody and gesture constrain the interpretation of double negation. Lingua, 131, 136–150.
Prince, E. F. (1981). Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 223–255). New York: Academic Press.
Puskas, G. (2006). Double negation and information structure: Somewhere between topic and focus. In V. Molnár & S. Winkler (Eds.), The architecture of focus. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Puskas, G. (2009). De l’interaction entre structure informationnelle et syntaxe: quelques réflexions sur la double négation en français. In P. Bernardini, V. Egerland & J. Granfeldt (Eds.), Mélanges plurilingues offerts à Suzanne Schlyter à l’occasion de son 65ème anniversaire. Lund: Lunds universitet Sprach och litteraturcentrum Romanska.
Puskas, G. (2012). Licensing double negation in NC and non-NC language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 30(2), 611–649.
Rowlett, P. (1998). Sentential negation in French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, B., & Whitehead, A. N. (1952). Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwenter, S. (2005). The pragmatics of negation in Brazilian Portuguese. Lingua, 115(10), 1427–1456.
Zeijlstra, H. (2004). Sentential negation and negative concord. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
Zhou, P., Thornton, R., & Crain, S. (2013). The logic of double negation in child language. In S. Baiz, N. Goldman & R. Hawkes (Eds.), Proceedings of 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 495–507). Somerville: Cascadilla.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the contributors to this volume and its referees for their constructive comments on this chapter; an earlier version also benefited from feedback by Patrick Duffley, Véronique Lenepveu and the participants to a seminar held in Neuchâtel on Halloween 2013. Responsibility for any shortcoming should not be attributed to nobody else but me.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Larrivée, P. (2016). The Markedness of Double Negation. In: Larrivée, P., Lee, C. (eds) Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17463-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17464-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)