Abstract
I present new data from European French involving embedded polar response particles (a.k.a. yes/no particles) in response to negative questions and develop a novel proposal which integrates the insights of previous analyses (e.g. Holmberg in Lingua 128:31–50, 2013; Roelofsen and Farkas in Language 91(2):359–414, 2015). The main puzzle has to do with the interpretation of non ‘no’ (bare or followed by a clause), which may assert its antecedent or the negation of its antecedent. It is shown that the meaning of non-responses varies as a function of the scope of negation with respect to various operators in its antecedent. Polar response particles in French are analyzed as the spell-out of a Polarity head which has moved from a lower position. The various interpretations of polar response particles are modelled as being constrained by the interaction between the necessity of the movement of the Polarity head and a constraint on scope preservation. The ramifications of this proposal for related phenomena (e.g. ‘low negation’ in English, N-word responses) are then discussed.
Highlights
This paper is about polar response particles (PRPs) in European French—that is, oui, non, and si—and how the choice of covert clauses in their complement determines their interpretation.1 By probing the interaction of quantifiers with negation in these covert clauses, it proposes a new analysis of these particles that builds on the insights of previous work on yes/no particles
I propose that PRPs spell out a Polarity head, which can have two different origins: it can be the copy of the Polarity head of the covert clause in its complement, or it can be a covert Polarity head that has been inserted as a last resort if there is an identity mismatch between the covert clause and the initiative the PRP responds to
I argue that this generalization falls out from the interaction of two independent elements: (i) a general syntax/semantics for PRPs—which, among other things, predicts that non is the realization of two underlying morphemes, negation or a reverse feature, in line with previous work—and (ii) the assumption that covert negation can be inserted as a last resort rescue strategy under ellipsis, following Falausand Nicolae (2016)
Summary
This paper is about polar response particles (PRPs) in European French—that is, oui, non, and si—and how the choice of covert clauses in their complement determines their interpretation. By probing the interaction of quantifiers with negation in these covert clauses, it proposes a new analysis of these particles that builds on the insights of previous work on yes/no particles. The intuition I would like to explore is that a sentence is negative when negation is the highest scope-bearing operator, and not negative otherwise—for instance, when negation is outscoped by a quantifier.3 Following this intuition, the interpretation of non can be characterized by the following generalization In (2), interpreting clausal negation in situ, i.e. in the scope of unspecific quelqu’un ‘someone’, yields truth conditions that are different from the ones corresponding to a structure where clausal negation is interpreted where non appears, i.e. with scope over the whole proposition In this case—and only in this case—a covert polarity head can be inserted and realized as non. 3. Roelofsen and Farkas (2015) use this intuition to define and mark discourse referents as positive or negative
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