Negation in Mising

Negative sentences are the opposite of positive ones; they negate the action expressed in positive clauses by using negative markers and/or negative words. English and Albanian are two languages in which negation is structured and expressed in different ways, although the negative markers are more or less the same. However, even though they may seem similar and corresponding to each other in both languages, they are used in different structures and have different scope. This paper gives a description and comparison of negative markers in English and Albanian. Their use and structure is illustrated by various examples to support the description. Based on this overview, it can be concluded that both English and Albanian have negative particles functioning as negative markers, as well as negative words. However, these negative markers and negative words do not express negation in the same way in these two languages. The simplest difference is that English has only one negative marker of verbal negation – not; while Albanian has several negative markers: nuk/s’ to mark primary as well as secondary verbal negation, mos to mark verbal negation in the indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative mood; jo is used to mark both sentential and constituent negation; as- as a negative particle marks both sentential and constituent negation and can be accompanied by one of the verbal negative markers nuk /s’. Even though there is a correspondence of not and nuk /s’ to mark verbal negation, there is a misbalance of negative markers and their uses in both languages. A further difference, and a greater one is the use of n-words or negative polarity items (NPIs). English as a single negation language forms negation by using negative verbs with NPI, or by using n-words as absolute negators. For instance, (1) Ben didn’t see anybody vs. (2) Ben saw nobody. In sentence (1) there is a negative verb which cannot be followed or preceded by an n-word, therefore the NPI anybody is used, while in sentence (2) there is a positive verb which allows the use of an n-word such as nobody. On the other hand, in Albanian, n-words such as negative adverbs and negative pronouns are only used accompanied by the verbal marker nuk/s’, thus creating negative concord as in the example: Askush nuk tha asgjë. In this sentence there are three negative words – askush, nuk, asgjë- which contribute to one semantic meaning. As far as conjunctions are concerned, most of them correspond in both languages in both structure and meaning. Similarly, prefixes share similar properties in English and Albanian, they are attached to adjectives, verbs or nouns to express negation, opposition, reversative or removing ideas. English also has a negative suffix –less, while Albanian has no negative suffixes, which could be considered as a slight difference.

Why do languages have such odd and complicated things as negative and positive polarity items? Surely, life would be much easier without them, and to be entirely frank, I have not yet encountered a single such item that I could not do without, if forced to. They appear to be part of the stylistic icing on the linguistic cake, adding color to texts and speech, making our daily conversations not only more complex than they need to be, but perhaps also a bit more fun. The idea that polarity items are primarily rhetorical devices has been put forward by a number of people, starting with Bolinger (e.g. 1972), and culminating in the work of Michael Israel, who has pursued this idea with great vigor in a long series of publications (Israel 1996, 1998a, 2001, 2004, 2008). Other work, with a somewhat different slant, such as Kadmon and Landman’s (1993) study of any, also suggests that negative polarity items are primarily intended to add rhetorical spice to a statement (‘strengthening’). Much of the work on polarity items has circled around issues of licensing, or triggering as it is often termed. Negative polarity items are licensed in certain environments, such as the scope of negation, and ungrammatical elsewhere, whereas positive polarity items are unwelcome (“anti-licensed” or “anti-triggered”) in the scope of (at least) direct negation (cf. Horn 1989, van der Wouden 1994, 1997, Zwarts 1998, Hoeksema 2000, Szabolcsi 2004). Rather less attention has been paid to matters of lexical semantics (what types of expressions, with what kind of lexical semantics, tend to become negative or positive polarity items) and even less to numerous collocation effects that appear to interfere with the licensing of polarity items (but see van der Wouden 1994, 1997, Sailer and Richer 2002). My goal, in this chapter, is to argue that lexical semantics and collocation effects should not be ignored, as they often reveal crucial information about the expressions involved. In particular, I want to make a case for the following claim: The distribution of negative polarity items results from the interplay of lexical meaning with global conditions on the proper use of these items. In addition, I want to argue that some properties of positive and negative polarity items are best understood from the perspective of expression, that is, the mapping from intended meaning to meaningful form. But first let me be a bit more specific about what I mean by global conditions. As a first illustration, let me briefly summarize Kadmon and Landman’s (1993) hugely influential analysis of any, without any doubt the world’s best-known, and most intensively studied polarity item. According to this analysis, the distribution of any is due to the interaction of its lexical semantics with a global constraint on acceptability. On the lexical semantic level, Kadmon and Landman view any as a domain widener. A combination such as any potato denotes roughly the same thing as a potato, but with a weaker contextual requirement as to what counts as a (relevant) potato, yielding a wider, larger set as the denotation. Hence Any potato will do is a stronger requirement than A potato will do, since it generically quantifies over potatoes of any stripe. If you are just a little bit hungry, a potato might do the trick, but

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.

Processing polarity: ERP evidence for differences between positive and negative polarity

This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. The bulk of the evidence presented in this book argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. With respect to the classification of NPIs , this book also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice 'any' in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.

The present paper contrasts English with the Swahili language at the level of syntax and semantics as far as the use of negative polarity items is concerned in order to foretell how divergences may hinder the learning of the other language as a foreign language. After the description of the structure on the use of negative polarity items in both languages, it has been observed that both English and Swahili coincide on the use of negative polarity items since both use negative polarity items to express the negation and NPIs are preceded by a negative marker in order to be non- assertive. The results have also revealed that in Standard English, negative polarity items cannot be used in the subject position in a declarative negative sentence instead we use pronouns, such as no one, nobody, nothing, etc., therefore, in the Swahili language, a negative polarity item may be used in the subject position and followed by the negative marker without an incidence on the meaning of the sentence. All these dissimilarities between English and Swahili languages on the use of negative polarity items may cause problems to the learners of the other language as a foreign language.

In this paper, I argue that pragmatics plays a role in the (anti-)licensing of polarity items in addition to semantic notions such as downward monotonicity and anti-additivity. In the case of positive polarity items (PPIs), I argue that they can co-occur with the anti-additive quantifier no N if intonation or enriched context makes it a contrastive negation or denial. The anti-licensing fails due to a positive implicature (PI) that performs pragmatic licensing and it is to this PI that PPIs contribute their meaning. As for negative polarity items (NPIs), I focus on the case of only that is not straightforwardly downward monotonic but licenses NPIs. Following Horn (2002), I assume that only is semantically conjunctive and that it licenses NPIs by its exclusive entailment that is negative. In addition to Horn’s arguments, I provide further arguments with domain-widening NPIs such as any, ever and minimizers that it is not to the prejacent but to the exclusive entailment that they contribute their domain widening (Kadmon and Landman 1993) function. In other words, the problem of only for NPI theories does not lie in the notion of downward monotonicity but in the compact packaging of two propositions with different monotonicity properties in one single sentence.

The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH; Bley-Vroman, 1989, 1990) contends that the nature of language in natives is fundamentally different from the nature of language in adult nonnatives. This study tests the FDH in two ways: (a) via second language (L2) poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) problems (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 2000) and (b) via a comparison between adult and child L2 learners, whose first language (L1) is the same, in terms of their developmental route (e.g., Schwartz, 1992, 2003). The phenomena under investigation are Korean wh-constructions with negative polarity items (NPIs). Korean has subject (S)-object (O)-verb (V) as its canonical word order and it is also a wh-in-situ language, but scrambling of the object to presubject position (i.e., movement that results in OSV word order) is generally optional; however, in the context of negative questions with a NPI subject (e.g., amwuto “anyone”), (a) object wh-phrases must scramble on the wh-question reading and (b) the nonscrambled order has a yes/no-question reading. These properties of Korean wh-constructions with NPIs constitute POS problems for nonnatives whose L1 is English (as well as for native Korean-acquiring children). L1-English adult L2 learners (n = 15) and L1-English child L2 learners (n = 10), independently assessed for Korean proficiency, as well as L1-Korean children (n = 23) and L1-Korean adults (n = 15) completed an elicited-production task, an acceptability-judgment task, and an interpretation-verification task. The results show that (a) high-proficiency (adult and child) L2 learners performed like the native adult controls on all three tasks, thereby demonstrating L2 POS effects; and (b) adult and child L2 learners follow the same (inferred) route to convergence, a route differing from—yet subsuming—the L1-child route. Both sets of results lead us to conclude that, contra the FDH, the nature of language is fundamentally similar in natives and (adult or child) nonnatives.

It is clear from the preceding chapters that formal accounts of the Jespersen Cycle which assume a single form of ne such as Roberts and Roussou (2003), Zeijlstra (2004) do not accommodate the changes in the distribution of ne described in Chapters 2 and 3 and therefore fail to model the distribution of ne adequately across the Jespersen Cycle. Instead, we need a means to distinguish two forms of ne . One way to do this would be to invoke a semantic distinction between a negative marker with a semantic negative feature and a negative polarity item (NPI) without. However, it raises the issue of what properties the NPI ne has within a taxonomy of negative polarity items such as that proposed by Hoeksma (2012), and how it is licensed. Breitbarth (2009) proposes to treat ME ne as a non-veridical polarity item. Zeijlstra (2010) proposes that French ne is also a non-veridical NPI. However, this kind of analysis overgeneralises the distribution of ME ne . Instead, Middle English ne has the properties of an anti-veridical NPI, in that it must be licensed by negation. Furthermore, the licensing conditions on ME ne are subject to strict syntactic locality constraints. Consequently, while it is plausible that an account could be sketched out in purely semantic terms to account for the changing distribution of ne , I instead model the changing distribution of ne within a Minimalist syntactic framework based on morphosyntactic features and feature agreement. Syntactic Framework and Assumptions The syntactic framework on which the analysis is based is a modified version of the Minimalist framework set out in Chomsky (1999, 2000), incorporating later proposals from Hiraiwa (2001), Pesetsky and Torrego (2007), Wurmbrand (2012) and Zeijlstra (2012). The approach is a modular one, in which the syntactic derivation assembles lexical items into larger structures which are interpreted or spelled out at two interfaces - PF (phonological form), where the morphological and phonological form of the syntactic unit is spelled out, and LF (logical form) where the syntactic unit is interpreted semantically. Semantic compositionality is fundamental, with the meaning of the structure read off its syntactic form.

This paper focuses on negative indefinites in Portuguese, paying particular attention to nemigalha, a negative indefinite that disappeared from the language around the 16th century. We claim that nemigalha originates from the reanalysis of the negative particle nem and the minimizer migalha in an early stage of the language, starting as a weak negative polarity item and then becoming a strong negative polarity item, in the sense of Martins (1997, 2000). It is well known that minimizers can grammaticalize into intrinsically negative items, being good candidates to undergo the Jespersen Cycle (Jespersen 1917). Although that was not the case of nemigalha, it completed all the grammaticalization stages proposed by Garzonio & Poletto (2008, 2009), losing all the properties of a common noun and being able to stand alone as the only negative marker in preverbal position. The comparison between nemigalha and the negative indefinite nada shows that both items exhibited similar behaviour and occurred in identical contexts, probably acting as competing items until nemigalha’s disappearance. Furthermore, a few examples from the 16th century suggest that nemigalha might have become a more functional item, participating as a negation marker in presuppositional contexts (cf. Larrivée 2010 and Hansen 2013).

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g., ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative adverb never (e.g., The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences were studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (Experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (Experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights into the complexity of multiple negations and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability.

This study investigates the acquisition of negation in complex sentences among L1 English learners of Korean, focusing on the syntactic interaction between the negative polarity item 'amudo' and the negative marker 'an' in matrix and embedded clauses. Acceptability judgment data from native Korean speakers and Intermediate and advanced learners revealed significant group differences. Despite advanced learners approaching native-like patterns, persistent difficulties stemmed from cross-linguistic differences, notably the L1 transfer of English NPI sentences. These findings underscore the need for explicit instruction addressing the clausemate condition governing Korean NPIs to mitigate L1 interference and enhance pedagogical efficacy. (Ewha Womans University)

In this paper, we attempt to link the inner workings of a neural language model to linguistic theory, focusing on a complex phenomenon well discussed in formal linguistics: (negative) polarity items. We briefly discuss the leading hypotheses about the licensing contexts that allow negative polarity items and evaluate to what extent a neural language model has the ability to correctly process a subset of such constructions. We show that the model finds a relation between the licensing context and the negative polarity item and appears to be aware of the scope of this context, which we extract from a parse tree of the sentence. With this research, we hope to pave the way for other studies linking formal linguistics to deep learning.

Negative polarity: A semantico-syntactic approach

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.