Abstract
Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as the news anchor didn’t warn nobody about the floods (meaning “the news anchor warned nobody”), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as the news anchor didn’t warn anybody about the floods, are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in “Standard” or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors. To explore this question, and the relationship between NC and NPI constructions, we compared the acceptability of overtly negative noun phrases (e.g., nobody), NPIs (e.g., anybody), and bare plurals (e.g., people), in negative contexts and in conditionals. Negative items were followed by a consequence which supported their single negative meaning, while conditional items were followed by a consequence compatible with the NPI and the bare plural but not the negative noun phrase. Acceptability ratings of the critical NC sentences were reliably lower than constructions with NPIs and bare plurals, but the consequences for all three of these sentence types were rated highly. This reflects an asymmetry in participants’ acceptance of NC and their readiness to interpret it in context. A follow-up study with only conditionals revealed that speakers can also find NPIs infelicitous in conditional contexts with consequences that are compatible with a negative interpretation of the NPI, and that negative arguments are felicitous in these same contexts. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that speakers who do not accept NC have grammars that generate both NC and NPI constructions, and further, that these speakers have two underlying structures for any-NPIs in English.
Highlights
Human languages display diversity in whether and how they instantiate negative dependencies (Auwera and Alsenoy, 2016)
To explore the relationship between participants’ acceptance of English Negative Concord (NC) and their ability to interpret it as truth conditionally equivalent to negative Negative Polarity Item (NPI) constructions, we compared participants’ acceptability ratings of three types of direct object in negative and conditional sentences
Each initial clause was followed by a second clause that, for the negative sentences, was compatible with a single negation reading, and for the conditional contexts was compatible with a no-negation reading
Summary
Human languages display diversity in whether and how they instantiate negative dependencies (Auwera and Alsenoy, 2016). In a subset of languages, negative arguments are typically found in Negative Concord (NC) constructions, in which two or more syntactic negations contribute a single semantic negation, as in the following Italian example from Zanuttini In (1), the preverbal negative marker non and the negative direct object argument nessuno “nobody” are interpreted as a single semantic negation, reflecting a pattern typical to NC constructions. Other languages instantiate negative dependencies through Negative Polarity Item (NPI) constructions. Other languages instantiate negative dependencies through Negative Polarity Item (NPI) constructions2 These NPI constructions are similar to the NC construction seen in (1), but they do not have an overtly negative noun phrase. In place of a phrase like nessuno “nobody” in (1), they contain a phrase which is not overtly negative but depends on a preceding element, prototypically a negation, for its licensing. The following is example is from Ewe (Collins et al, 2017, p. 2, ex. (2b)):
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