Abstract
We consider the to date minimally discussed phenomenon of negative exclamatives in Afrikaans. Negative exclamatives superficially seem to be negative, when they are in fact positive exclamations. These structures therefore feature so-called expletive negation. Our goal is to illustrate some aspects of the phenomenon as it manifests in Afrikaans, and to demonstrate that Afrikaans’s negative exclamatives seem well behaved when considered against a broader crosslinguistic backdrop.
Highlights
The term negative exclamative refers to structures like (1):(1) Hoe lank het jy nie geword nie! how tall have you not became POL2 “How tall you’ve become!/You’ve become so tall!” (i)Ek kan tog (*onmoontlik) alleen die werk doen!I can surely impossibly alone the work do POL “Surely I can’t possibly be expected to do the work on my own!” (Oosthuizen 1998: 79)Here the semantic power of the negation element seems to have been lost or altered (Portner and Zanuttini, 2000: 201)
We find the same phenomenon in other languages permitting negative exclamatives
Just like the German examples in (25), this Afrikaans minimal pair suggests that the semantic and prosodic peculiarities of the expletive negation found in negative exclamatives are assocated with structures in which the sentential negator clause-medial nicht and nie respectively - occupies a structurally higher position than that which it occupies in regular negative structures, usually thought to be somewhere within the vP-domain
Summary
The term negative exclamative refers to structures like (1):. (1) Hoe lank het jy nie geword nie! how tall have you not became POL2 “How tall you’ve become!/You’ve become so tall!”. The semantic power of the negation element seems to have been lost or altered (Portner and Zanuttini, 2000: 201). Oosthuizen 1998 for discussion):. This phenomenon is attested elsewhere, as already noted by Jespersen at the start of the 20th century (cf Jespersen 1913, cited in Delfitto and Fiorin, 2004: 284; see the latter source, Portner and Zanuttini 2000, and references cited therein). The purpose of this short paper is, firstly, to offer some illustration of its manifestation in modern-day Afrikaans (section 2), and to comment on the properties it shares with its counterparts in other languages (section 3)
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