Capturing expletive negation with complex left branches

Expletive negative markers, i.e., negative markers that do not reverse the truth conditions of the sentence in which they occur, have been reported to appear in a wide array of languages and in a fairly large set of syntactic environments. Previous research has shown that expletive negation is a non-homogeneous phenomenon. Focusing on Greek, I motivate two general claims related to this non-homogeneity: (i) Greek expletive negation hosts can be classified into two linguistically relevant groups, depending on whether they feature the standard negative marker dhen or the modal negative marker min. (ii) The semantic contribution of the expletive occurrences of dhen and min retains at least parts of the meaning of their respective non-expletive counterparts. After presenting some first evidence that the dichotomy of expletive negation hosts motivated by the Greek data extends to other languages, I submit the following hypothesis as a novel promising perspective in the study of expletive negation cross-linguistically: The bi-partite distinction between dhen-expletive negation hosts and min-expletive negation hosts may be cross-linguistically valid, suggesting that expletive negation hosts across languages are divided into two classes: (a) a class of expletive negation licensors that obscure the truly negative semantics of the featured negative markers, and (b) a class of modal expletive negation licensors that feature expletive negative markers corresponding to the spell-out of modal or deontic ordering sources.

A number of works have explored expletive negation in clause-linkage constructions. Most of them have shown that this type of negative marker can be omitted from the adverbial clause without affecting the interpretation holding between clauses. The study shows, based on the analysis of natural discourse data, that expletive negation has developed an intriguing discourse function in three types of ‘until’ constructions in Huasteca Nahuatl: ‘not…until’ constructions, scalar additive ‘until’ constructions, and beginning-to-end constructions. When the negative marker amo appears in the ‘until’ clause, the proposition should be characterized as expressing surprise. When it is absent from the ‘until’ clause, the proposition does not express surprise. This function of the expletive negative marker amo does not appear in elicited sentences, but only in spontaneous speech. It is proposed that Huasteca Nahuatl developed expletive negation in ‘not…until’ constructions due to contact with Spanish. However, the development of expletive negation in scalar additive ‘until’ constructions and beginning-to-end constructions is an internally motivated development in Huasteca Nahuatl that cannot be attributed to Spanish.

This article focuses on a non-canonical use of negation in historical and modern French, characterized by an apparent absence of meaning: expletive negation. In search of the lost meaning of expletive negation, via a diachronic investigation from Latin to French, we establish that expletive negation originates from prohibitive negation. We put forward an analysis of prohibitive negation within Krifka (2014)'s model of embedded speech-act and propose that expletive negation is the continuation of prohibitive negation, and that it is what remains of a long-gone embedded negative imperative in French. Along this line of analysis, the article brings historical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that languages can develop from speech-act embedding to proposition embedding. Our analysis of prohibitive negation as a clause-typing negation marker in Latin and as a verbal mood negation marker brings new evidence to the claim that sentential and verbal mood marking are two intimately related phenomena.

This paper explores ‘expletive’ uses of the negative marker pas in Québec French (QF) (Kemp 1982, Larriv´ee 1996), which despite checking every diagnostic for expletive negation (ExN), do not pattern with previously documented cases of ExN. We show that most previous accounts of ExN can thus not explain ExN pas’s distribution. Building on van der Wouden’s (1994) approach to ExN as negative polarity items (NPIs), and adopting an alternative-based account of NPIs (Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998, Chierchia 2013, a.o.), wepropose a preliminary analysis of ExN pas as part of a ‘complex’ NPI. That is, ExN pasrealizes one of two pieces in the composition of an NPI: (i) it does not contribute existential quantification of its own, but (ii) requires that the predicative existential expression it co-occurs with activate a set of domain alternatives. Though this analysis stands out in making a number of correct predictions about the distribution of ExN pas, it faces an empirical challenge, which we ultimately leave as an issue for future work.

Expletive negation refers to constructions where a negator in the complement of certain lexical items does not change the polarity of the complement proposition. Jin & Koenig (2021) show that expletive negation occurs rather widely in languages of the world and in very similar environments. They propose a language production model of why such apparently illogical uses of negation arise in language after language. But their study does not address the grammatical status and representation of expletive negation. In this paper, we argue that expletive negation is part of the lexical knowledge speakers have of their language and that the negator in expletive negation constructions contributes a negation to a non-at-issue content associated with expletive negation triggers. We provide a Lexical Resource Semantics analysis of how triggers combine in a non-standard manner with the standard semantic content of their complements: the negation (and in some cases an additional modal operator) of the content of their complement is part of the trigger’s non-at-issue content while the scope of the negation is an argument of the trigger’s MAIN content. Finally, we suggest that the expletive use of the French negator ne includes a lexical constraint that requires it to modify a verb that reverse selects for an expletive negation trigger.

Spanish punctual hasta-clauses (‘until’) have been described as identical in meaning when containing or not an expletive negation, that is, a negative marker that apparently does not contribute to the sentence meaning. I show that the negation in the hasta-clause does in fact play a role in the meaning calculation. My proposal is that the semantic contribution of the so-called “expletive” negation is to negate that the eventuality in the main clause holds during the interval denoted in the hasta-clause; as a result, such eventuality is expected to hold after the eventuality in the hasta-clause is finished. The novelty of my analysis is the comparison of the aspect (specifically, the durativity component) of the eventualities expressed in the hasta-clause.

This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal clauses warrants an analysis of EN in terms of an operator of implicature denial. This approach derives the fact that EN is truth-conditionally irrelevant from the fact that the semantics of negation as a truth-value reversal operator is shifted, in the case of EN, to the layer of implicated meaning. The analysis has a number of interesting consequences for the notion of metalinguistic negation. It further derives many of the interpretive effects normally linked to the so-called evaluative analysis of EN, and is compatible with a new set of data showing that EN scopally interacts with other negative elements. Finally, the proposal advanced here has a number of non-trivial implications regarding the relation between morphosyntax and the systems of interpretation, potentially affecting the standard view of language within cognition.

This work aims to investigate the role of negation when it fails to reverse the polarity of a sentence, thus becoming “expletive”. An example is offered by the following Italian sentence: Chiara è rimasta in casa finché Marco non ha chiamato la pizzeria per la cena (literally ‘Chiara remained in the house until Marco did not call the pizzeria for dinner’, meaning ‘Chiara remained at home until Marco called the pizzeria for dinner’). Although negation occurs, the sentence remains affirmative, and the negative marker fails to trigger all the semantic and syntactic phenomena usually associated with it. Here we implement two experiments, an acceptability judgement task and a self-paced reading paradigm, to test how expletive negation is understood and processed. Our findings reveal a complex picture of expletive negation in Italian. Acceptability judgements suggest that it increases sentence naturalness. The self-paced reading data show no additional processing cost associated with expletive negation, unlike standard negation. By integrating offline and online measures, our study represents a crucial step towards a more comprehensive understanding of expletive negation in linguistic processing, which seems to diverge from the processing of standard negation.

Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker “non” (“not”) has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced.

In this paper I argue, following proposals by Laka (1990), Aboh (2010), De Clercq (2013; 2020a), and Greco (2019; 2020ab) among others, that negation has a dedicated position in the left periphery where it takes wide scope over the lower sentential material. This position is separate and independent from the TP-level PolP, and it can convey sentential negation on its own. As evidence for this, I present data from Modern Irish concerning an emphatic marker known as Demonic Negation from McCloskey (2009; 2018). I argue that this element is a true semantic negator rather than a metalinguistic negator, and that it is base generated in a polar projection immediately dominating FocP, independently from the lower positions where sentential negation is standardly encoded. This has a broader relevance for the general theory of the syntactic encoding of negation, since it demonstrates that negative markers can be base-generated in their highest scope position, and thus that they need not always originate in the VP-layer as proposed in recent research. Additionally, the possibility of raising a constituent to the SpecFocP to the right of the Demonic Negation is exploited to express scalar negation and Focus/constituent negation, bypassing the Irish restriction which prevents negation from being expressed below the inflectional layer (Acquaviva 1996).

This work describes and compares a relatively new construction in their Italian and English variants, namely not-NOM-that constructions and not-ACC-ing constructions respectively: Non io che perdo le chiavi di casa per la seconda volta quest’anno / Not me losing my housekeys twice this year. Despite the presence of a negative marker, these sentences retain an affirmative meaning, expressing irony, sarcasm, or self-deprecation (rephrased as ‘It is ironic and surprising that I lost my housekeys twice this year’). They are predominantly used by younger generations on social media and in informal speech. We compare the English construction with its Italian counterpart, focusing on their syntax. More specifically, we provide an in-depth structural analysis of English not-ACC-ing constructions claiming that they contain a focalized Acc-ing construction (in the sense of Lowe 2019) and Expletive Negation (following Greco 2020). We also claim that the main structural and semantic properties of Italian not-NOM-that constructions also derive from: (i) the presence of a high negation merged in the CP layer, (ii) the focalization of a whole chunk of structure.

One construction that has traditionally been neglected in the typological study of clause-linkage is that built on ‘let alone’ (e.g., the baby can’t even talk, let alone walk). The present study explores this construction in a convenience sample of 47 languages. There are languages in which ‘let alone’ clauses appear not only with a clause-linking device, but also with an optional standard negative marker. Moreover, there are languages in which standard negation is forbidden in the ‘let alone’ clause. Here it is shown that optional standard negation may be semantically empty or may have an expressive-evaluative layer of semantic interpretation. On the other hand, standard negation tends to be forbidden in ‘let alone’ clauses appearing with semantically monofunctional clause-linking devices. The paper further investigates whether the analysis advanced for ‘let alone’ clauses can be generalized to other semantically negative adverbial clauses: ‘without V-ing’, ‘instead of V-ing’, and ‘before’ clauses. It is demonstrated that in these latter adverbial clauses, standard negation may be forbidden or optional. Interestingly, unlike the situation with ‘let alone’ clauses, there are languages in which standard negation may be obligatory in the ‘without V-ing’, ‘instead of V-ing’, and ‘before’ clause. In this scenario, the adverbial relations are compositionally encoded by a standard negative marker together with a general marker.

The aim of this paper is to identify which syntactic structures allow the interpretation of meaningless or expletive negation and under what conditions formal negation appears in the syntax of natural languages, with especial reference to Central Catalan. I shall describe two syntactic environments: (a) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause of a comparative structure of inequality, and (b) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause in the subjunctive tense-mood of certain predicates. In both structures I shall assume that there is a lexical item at the main clause which subcategorizes, among other possible complements, for a que (than, that) clause. At D-structure there is, furthermore, a NegP which is the complement of this conjunction. At the level of LF no expletive is specified, because the logical specifications of the lexical items which subcategorize for these subordinate clauses absorb the value of the negative operator.

Negation in modern Mongolian was analyzed by scholars namely : Luvsanvandan Sh (1968, 2000), Wonsoo Yu (1991), Monkh-Amgalan Yu (1998), Purev-Ochir B. (1998, 2001), Byambasan P. (2006), Kunihiko Hasimoto (2008), Bat-Ireedui J.(2009), Ravdan E. (2009), Monkh-Amgalan Yu & Kan Shin (2014). Sentential negation in modern Mongolian is not sufficiently studied in sentential and discourse level s . The tendency of modern linguistic requires us to conduct more comprehensive and deeper research than previous scholars did. Our research is considered to be the first intended research on negation in modern Mongolian, because it is one part of Ph.D dissertation on negative meaning of modern Mongolian. There are two forms of sentential negation s in modern Mongolian language, namely: explicit and implicit. Explicit negation is expressed by negative markers, but implicit negation is expressed by form s without negative markers, positive form s , intonation s , structure s with interrogative word s and phrase s . Negative markers have preverbal and postverbal positions in sentences. Preverbal negative markers are all particles ( buu, bitgij, ul, es, alga) and have SONegV sentential type, but postverbal negative markers are particles ( uguj , bis, bus ) and negative grammatical morphemes (- guj, -udzaj 2 , -lguj, -ltguj, -mguj, -sguj ) which have SOVNeg type. Particles, which are used as preverbal and postverbal negative markers in modern Mongolian, have more specific features than negative markers in other languages. Their unique features are to be used not only as negative markers in negative sentences, but also to substitute for verb phrases in c-command and sentences in the discourse level. This paper aims to consider how sentential negative markers in modern Mongolian are used as pro-forms of negative sentences. Keywords: modern Mongolian, preverbal, postverbal, negative marker, pro-verb, pro-clause, pro-sentence

In Ancient Greek a single set of indefinite enclitic pronouns was used indifferently in both negative/affective environments (i.e. like negative polarity items (NPI)) and in positive ones (i.e. like positive polarity items (PPI)). At the same time the negative pronouns used as negative quantifiers (NQ) were also employed as emphatic NPIs, with negative concord. The two functions of each class (i.e. PPI-like vs NPI-like, NQ vs NPI) were determined by syntactic distribution. In the specific case of negative sentences, an indefinite before a sentential negative marker (NM) functioned like a PPI but after a NM like an NPI, while a negative pronoun before a NM was an NQ but after an NM an NPI. This pattern was at odds with the canonical VSO clause structure that evolved in later antiquity, in which focal constituents were contrastively stressed and fronted to the left periphery: neither indefinite nor negative pronouns could be focalised because of the prosodic and/or semantic restrictions on their distribution. This deficiency was eventually remedied by formal/prosodic recharacterisation, the loss of NQs and the generalisation of NPIs to all syntactic positions available to DPs, including the focus position, a process that triggered their reinterpretation as involving universal quantification over negation rather than, as before, existential quantification under negation. The Modern Greek PPI kápjos and NPI kanís are traced from their origins in Ancient Greek and their role in the evolution of the system is explored. The final outcome is typologically to be expected in so far as NQs are redundant in a system in which NPIs appear freely both before and after NMs.