Abstract
Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single semantic one (e.g., the ‘I ate nothing’ reading of “I didn’t eat nothing”), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. ‘It is not the case that I ate nothing’). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports micro-parametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation.
Highlights
Consider the following sentence:(1) Maria didn’t eat nothing today.Sentence (1) has two syntactic negations, -n’t and nothing, and two possible interpretations
The responses are separated by speaker intent, which was either double negation (DN) or negative concord (NC). (Recall that the True-False verification question in the stimuli elicitation task served as a measure of speaker intent, and only the audio files for which the verification question was answered correctly were included in the experiment.)
The reverse pattern is observed for the Subject condition, in which participants were more biased toward DN interpretations, regardless of speaker intent: In both cases, NC responses were well below 35%
Summary
Consider the following sentence:(1) Maria didn’t eat nothing today.Sentence (1) has two syntactic negations, -n’t and nothing, and two possible interpretations. In Zeijlstra’s (2004:8) terms, “languages exhibit either syntactic or semantic negation” Under this theory, NC languages, in which negative elements typically appear to act in concord with one another in a clause, are the reflection of a system of syntactic negation. DN, on the other hand, reflects a system in which a unique semantic negation underlies each surface syntactic occurrence of negation Following this view, once a child has determined which type of language she is acquiring, her linguistic performance should reflect a general and overall bias toward either NC or DN, and this biased behavior is expected to solidify as the child converges on her adult language (Thornton et al 2016). In contrast with Zeijlstra’s (2004) two different grammars approach, Déprez’s “micro-parametric” view suggests that distinct syntactic configurations will yield either NC or DN readings in a given language. We review previous experimental work which shows unequivocally that NC and DN coexist in prototypical Romance languages, and which suggests that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN
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