Abstract
AbstractThis paper reports the results of an experimental investigation designed to test the interpretation of the optional doubling of the negative markersnoandpasin Expletive Negation (EN) contexts and in preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts in Catalan. We show that in EN contexts a negative interpretation ofnois preferred to an expletive one, with non-negative readings being less widespread than expected from what is described in traditional grammars. In NCI contexts the overt presence ofnobasically contributes to a single negation interpretation, thus confirming the status of Catalan as a Negative Concord language. We also show that, in the absence of discourse environments,pasin both EN and NCI contexts shows a variable interpretation, a characteristic of negative polarity items. Our results indicate thatpasdoes not increase the amount of negative interpretation ofnoin EN contexts, or of double negation in NCI contexts, but is an item dependent on the interpretation ofno. We conclude that the strengthening role of Catalanpas(at stage two of Jespersen’s cycle), while associated with the expression of metalinguistic negation, does not reverse the truth or falsity of a proposition.
Highlights
In this paper, we experimentally investigate the interpretation that Central Catalan speakers attribute to the negative marker no in two different syntactic contexts, namely (i) the subordinate clause of fear verbs such as em temo ‘I fear’ and em fa por ‘I am afraid’, and (ii) the sequence Negative Concord Item + no + V
This is a surprising result in view of the presumed negation reinforcing role of pas and the results obtained in Experiment 1, but as will become clear in Figure 5 it is in consonance with the result obtained in Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts: pas behaves as a negative polarity item under the scope of no
Our results show that pas behaves in an unexpected way for a reinforcer or strengthener of negation: while in Expletive Negation (EN) contexts pas increases non-negative readings, which are associated with an expletive variant of no, in NCI contexts pas diminishes the percentage of double negation (DN), which would presumably follow from the combination of a negative no and a negative NCI
Summary
Experiment 1 was designed to serve as a preliminary selection task of the types of sentences with EN triggers that we aimed to include in Experiment 2
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