Negative Morpheme Research Articles

Theory and experiment in Parametric Minimalism: the case of Romance Negation

<p>This paper has a double goal: frst, it lays down and refnes the basic hypotheses on the parametric structure of Romance negative systems that were originally introduced in my presentation at the Venice GLOW Workshop on Dialect Variation in 1987 (especially sections 3-9 and 11-13)3; then it further elaborates on them (sections 10 and 14-15), and revisits the conclusions (sections 16-22) in light of a more recent minimalist approach to the possible formats of parametric variation (the Principles & Schemata model, sketched in Longobardi 2005a). More generally, the theoretical focus of the article is on exploring how minimalist research on syntactic diversity could be conducted.</p><p>In the spirit of Borer (1984), the parameters of negation can be argued to be essentially encoded in the lexical entries of the sentential negation morpheme and of the negative determiners of each language. No space is left in this framework for such generic notions as (strict or non-strict) ‘negative concord’ vs. ‘double negation’ languages. In fact, these notions looked at best epiphenomenal and obsolete already in 1987: in spite of their continued use even in recent literature, they turn out to be both insuffcient and unnecessary, and are potentially misleading.</p><p>Now, a good deal of the negation parametrisation can be shown to have to do with the feature composition of lexical entries and to be actually nearly ‘perfect’, in three minimalist senses: frst, given Boolean conditions on feature association, the parametric choices exhaust the set of logical possibilities, determining whether the values of such features may, must, or may not co-occur on one and the same (class of) item(s); second, all the parameters needed for crosslinguistic descriptive adequacy ft into independently attested and restrictive schemata; third, they are shaped by, or interact with, natural third-factor conditions (Chomsky 2005); fnally the parametrisation hypothesised is ‘complete’ in the technical sense that all the typologically possible combinations of values turn out to be attested.</p><p>With respect to UG principles, I show how objections against the possible universality of conditions on covert long-distance dependencies, as established by Italian negative operators (Rizzi 1982, Longobardi 1991), can be successfully addressed and eventually dismissed. Furthermore, such conditions are argued to be fully structural principles rather than functional preferences.</p>

Negation in Hamar

This study deals with the negation of declarative and interrogative main clauses, imperatives, and non-verbal and existential sentences in Hamar, an Aroid language of the Omotic language family. It describes the ways in which negation is expressed in the language, and positions the discussion in light of cross-linguistic observations made by Dahl (1979, 2010), Payne (1985), Miestamo (2005, 2007), Eriksen (2011) and others. The morpheme -t- is used in Hamar to mark negation in both verbal and non-verbal clauses. This means that Hamar has a morphological or affixal negation (Dahl 2010). The language uses two different sets of subject agreement affixes for the affirmative and negative counterparts. While affirmative sentences employ a shortened pronoun, a set of agreement suffixes is used in the negative. In this study, it is suggested that the negative verbs may have preserved older subject agreement morphemes which are now lost in the affirmative, as negatives are less affected by innovation, cf. Zargulla in Azeb 2009 and Canadian French in Poplack 2001. Moreover, close interaction is reported between negation and TAM (Tense, Aspect and Mood) categories. For example, some of the aspect/tense categories that occur in the affirmative are neutralised in the negative. Negative constructions in Hamar are not only different from their affirmative counterparts due to the presence of the negation morpheme –t-, but also in terms of subject agreement marking and tense/aspect categories. As a result, it is argued that Hamar has an asymmetric negation system, cf. Miestamo 2005.

Finding frequency effects in the usage of NOT collocations in American Sign Language

This study explores whether American Sign Language (ASL) users exhibit frequency effects on two-sign combinations as observed in spoken languages. Studies on spoken languages have demonstrated that frequency of usage influences the emergence of grammatical constructions; however, there has been less investigation of this question for signed languages. To examine frequency effects in ASL, this study analyzes patterns of a grammatical manual negation morpheme glossed as NOT produced sequentially with other signs. Findings reveal that NOT is produced with specific signs, demonstrating that the grammaticalization of NOT increases as frequency does in ASL collocations. The analysis shows that a few signs are highly phonologically fused with the negation marker, providing emerging evidence that these collocations have experiencedchunking, as they are schematic, fused constituent structures in ASL. Given frequency effects found in the study, chunking appears to be a domain-general cognitive processing mechanism independent of modality effects.

Chinese Negation Morpheme bù in Academic Writing

Negation can be conveyed through various forms in a language. In Chinese, bù is the most common negative form, and it can also be a morpheme of a compound word which expresses negation and/or concepts closely associated with negation, e.g. modality and contrast. In order to capture most types of Chinese words carrying these concepts, we investigate Chinese words containing bù. This study first classifies bù-related words into seven categories according to the word structure and the negative connotation of bù as a morpheme retained in the word. The categorisation is then applied to the wordlists of a research article corpus and a conversational corpus. The results show that there are many fewer occurrences of bù as a negator in research articles than in conversation, and that there is greater use of four-syllable Chinese idioms (chéngyǔ) in research articles than in conversation. In addition, different sets of bù-related words are used to express contrast and modality.

Pragmatic accommodation as a catalyst for the development of (non-)finiteness

AbstractA morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological shape of a negation element is dependent on the finiteness of the verb it negates. Pragmatic factors are identified that could motivate the development of this shared asymmetry, using evidence from the grammar of a Dravidian-influenced contact language. I will show that contrastive finiteness marking (finite and non-finite morphology) can facilitate the development of pragmatically-motivated linear reordering of affirmative clauses and negated clauses in order to accommodate new information structure conventions, extending the contrast to negated verbs by expanding the functional range of a negative imperative marker.Radical contact languages resulting from collective adult second language acquisition in naturalistic social contexts are typically presumed to feature reduced functional morphology, in which only highly salient contrasts, such as temporal contrasts, are formally instantiated. If a formal finiteness contrast and other relatively marked properties (“complexity”) could develop in a highly analytic contact language that did not previously have them, this suggests that such a sequence of changes is in fact as plausible among genetically-unrelated languages in a sprachbund as it is over longer periods of time in genetically-related languages. We can observe this by examining grammatical change in a language that previously lacked both a finiteness contrast and a corresponding negation asymmetry, but which developed both the contrast and the asymmetry as a result of contact with a genetically-unrelated language that has analogous properties.Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) has undergone grammatical change due to contact with Dravidian (primarily Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil). Several of these changes involve verb morphology and syntax, and are plausibly motivated by discourse-pragmatic triggers. Consideration of tense and (non-)finiteness phenomena, as well as their reflexes in SLM negation, suggests a discourse-pragmatic motivation for these changes. Two discourse processes could conspire to motivate the development of the new morphology in SLM. The first is a clausal asymmetry, in which the predicate representing the most recent event is ordinarily in focus, indicated by tense morphology and position of the clause relative to clauses referring to subsequent events. The second is the communicative need to reassign focus in certain contexts to a temporally non-primary clause, one referring to an event that did not take place first. In spite of a constraint in Dravidian languages blocking the marking of functional contrasts under negation (so that only a negation morpheme can be prefixed to the verb), negation morphology encodes an obligatory finiteness contrast, optimally supporting these information-structuring processes. The clause describing the most recent event in a sentence remains visibly finite under negation, when a temporally secondary clause is focused.

Sentential Negation in Libyan Arabic: A Generative Perspective

<p>This paper discusses negation in Libyan Arabic and attempts to put forward an analysis for negation in the language. The paper reveals that Pollock’s analysis (1989) of negation cannot account for Libyan Arabic as the language does not display complementary distribution between the second negative marker and indefinite quantifiers. Furthermore, the analysis does not account for the cliticisation of ‘ma-’ and ‘-š’ on each other forming the free negation morpheme ‘miš’ used to negate future tense clauses. Building on Benmamoun’s analysis (2000), the paper argues that that the (dis)continuous morpheme ‘ma-’ and ‘-š’ heads a NegP that selects a TP complement. The proposed analysis assumes that the verb moves out of the VP to T and then to Neg where it merges with ‘ma-š in affirmative clauses, whereas in yes-no interrogative clauses, verb movement is followed by movement from Neg to C. </p>

The emergence of reduplicative polar interrogatives

The paper proposes that reduplication as a widespread morphological process has the potential ability to form polar interrogatives in natural languages. Our proposal is based on a cross-linguistic investigation, covering empirical data from Ruyuan Mien (Miao-Yao), Nuosu Yi (Tibeto-Burman), and some Chinese dialects. The emergence of reduplicative polar interrogative in Ruyuan Mien and Nuosu Yi turns out to be the result of the interplay of phonology and syntax. The reduplicative polar interrogative in Ruyuan Mien is found to be a reduced form of the A-not-A polar interrogative, derived by deleting the negative morpheme but retaining and re-linking its tone to the first conjunct. In contrast, the reduplicative polar interrogative in Nuosu Yi is formed by linking a floating mid-level tone [33], which is equivalent to an interrogative particle, to the copy of the verbal predicate. The surface reduplicative form assumed by polar interrogatives in these languages might lead language users to believe that it is reduplication that encodes interrogativity in their languages. Only when there is no tonal difference between the base and the copy in a reduplicative polar interrogative sentence can we claim that reduplication is able to encode interrogativity. This exactly happens in the Chinese dialects spoken in Huaiyin, Mianyang, and Jianli. Our proposal not only expands the functions of reduplication, but also enriches the inventory of strategies to form polar interrogatives in natural languages.

On Preverbal Negation in Sicilian and Syntactic Parasitism

In this paper the authors describe two different cases of CP negation in Sicilian dialects. The first element is a left periphery adverb that is derived from a grammaticalized negative cleft. The second one is a negative head that is lexicalized when a higher functional projection is activated. While the two items display a set of relevant differences, it is argued that they exemplify two possible cases of syntactic parasitism. The term is used to indicate that either the position of the parasitic element is “borrowed” from another type of category (in the present case it is Focus) or the presence of a given head (a negative morpheme in this case) is licensed by the presence of a different item in a proximate structural position. The existence of similar phenomena is potentially very interesting for the theoretical definition of the syntactic architecture and its economy and design principles.

Sentential Negative Markers as Pro-Forms of Negative Sentences in Modern Mongolian

Negation in modern Mongolian was analyzed by scholars namely : Luvsanvandan Sh (1968, 2000), Wonsoo Yu (1991), Monkh-Amgalan Yu (1998), Purev-Ochir B. (1998, 2001), Byambasan P. (2006), Kunihiko Hasimoto (2008), Bat-Ireedui J.(2009), Ravdan E. (2009), Monkh-Amgalan Yu & Kan Shin (2014). Sentential negation in modern Mongolian is not sufficiently studied in sentential and discourse level s . The tendency of modern linguistic requires us to conduct more comprehensive and deeper research than previous scholars did. Our research is considered to be the first intended research on negation in modern Mongolian, because it is one part of Ph.D dissertation on negative meaning of modern Mongolian. There are two forms of sentential negation s in modern Mongolian language, namely: explicit and implicit. Explicit negation is expressed by negative markers, but implicit negation is expressed by form s without negative markers, positive form s , intonation s , structure s with interrogative word s and phrase s . Negative markers have preverbal and postverbal positions in sentences. Preverbal negative markers are all particles ( buu, bitgij, ul, es, alga) and have SONegV sentential type, but postverbal negative markers are particles ( uguj , bis, bus ) and negative grammatical morphemes (- guj, -udzaj 2 , -lguj, -ltguj, -mguj, -sguj ) which have SOVNeg type. Particles, which are used as preverbal and postverbal negative markers in modern Mongolian, have more specific features than negative markers in other languages. Their unique features are to be used not only as negative markers in negative sentences, but also to substitute for verb phrases in c-command and sentences in the discourse level. This paper aims to consider how sentential negative markers in modern Mongolian are used as pro-forms of negative sentences. Keywords: modern Mongolian, preverbal, postverbal, negative marker, pro-verb, pro-clause, pro-sentence

The Acquisition of Negative Morphemes by Jordanian EFL Learners.

تقدم هذه الدراسة نتائج دراسة لاكتساب المتعلمين الأردنيين في الجامعة الأردنية لإضافات (مورفيمات) النفي البادئة في اللغة الإنجليزية. يزعم خرما وحجاج (1998)، القاضي (1992) وسعودي وكفالي سفورزا وجماري (2001) أن عملية دمج المقاطع الزائدة لجذور الكلمات في اللغة الإنجليزية لتغيير نوعها هي عملية عشوائية محضة. تقدم هذه الدراسة أدلة عملية وتجريبية على أن عملية دمج مورفيمات النفي لجذور الكلمات ليست عشوائية؛ إذ إن المعرفة بالقيود الفونولوجية والصرفية والدلالية لتلك المورفيمات والتعرض للغة ومدى تكرار المفردات أو المورفينات يؤثر بشكل كبير على اكتساب علم الصرف الاشتقاقي بما في ذلك مورفيمات النفي. تم جمع البيانات من خلال اختبار مكتوب يحتوي على 23 جملة تمثل إضافات النفي في اللغة الإنجليزية. تشير النتائج إلى أن أكثر الإجابات الصحيحة كانت لمورفيمات تتبع لقواعد فونولوجية معينة مثل قاعدة التماثل (الإدغام) كما تؤكد النتائج أن أكثر الإجابات الصحيحة كانت تلك المتعلقة بإضافات النفي الأكثر تكراراً في الكتب المنهجية في الأردن كذلك لم يجد مجتمع الدراسة (الطلبة المبحوثون) تلك الإضافات بالصعوبة نفسها؛ وهذا يدل على أن اكتساب أولئك المبحوثين لإضافات النفي يعتمد على جذر الكلمة التي تضاف إليها تلك المورفيمات أو على مورفيم النفي ذاته. من جهة أخرى تدل أخطاء المبحوثين أن المورفيم (un-) هو المورفيم الأم؛ لأنه كان أكثر مورفيم تم تعميمه بشكل خاطئ. أخيراً إن التباين ذا الدلالة في أداء المبحوثين الذين كانوا ينتمون إلى مستويين تعليميين مختلفين (طلاب جامعيين من السنة الأولى وآخرين من السنة الرابعة) يدل على أن التعرض للغة كان عاملاً رئيسياً لاكتساب تلك المورفيمات (Hart Risley, 1995; Shresta, 1998; Rott, 1999; Biemiller, 2006; Tremblay, 2006; Christ, 2007; Pitt, Dilley and Tat, 2011).

Finiteness, negation and the directionality of headedness in Bangla

This paper investigates a pattern in the South Asian language Bangla which strongly resembles the finite/non-finite positioning of verbs in English and French reported in Pollock (1989). In finite clauses in Bangla, verbs precede negation, as in English, while in non-finite clauses verbs follow negation, as in French. The paper considers whether the analysis of (leftwards) movement of the verb to Tense/Agreement in finite clauses argued for by Pollock for French should be assumed to operate in the SOV language Bangla as well, potentially supporting a Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) head-initial analysis of Bangla, which has elsewhere regularly been taken to be a head-final language. Considering other patterns in the language relating to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing and quantifier scope in finite and non-finite clauses, it is argued that a leftwards head-movement analysis is unable to account for such patterns. A different analysis of the alternating position of negation and verbs is then suggested, which attributes this to the realization of negation either in the specifier or head position of NegP, drawing on Pollock’s (1989) analysis of the dual location of negative morphemes in French and on much recent work on alternations between specifier and head lexicalization (van Gelderen 2004 and others).

Accentuate the positive: semantic access in english compounds.

The present study supplements research on semantic effects in word processing by focusing on the role that meanings of morphemes play in recognition of complex words. We present an overview of behavioral effects of six semantic properties characterizing the emotional and sensory connotations of English compounds and their morphemes, as well as their semantic richness. Semantics of compounds affected latencies to those compounds, and semantics of morphemes affected latencies to those morphemes presented as isolated words. Yet semantics of morphemes had little bearing on recognition of compounds, with the exception of longer recognition times for compounds with emotionally negative morphemes (e.g., seasick). We interpret the data as evidence against obligatory decomposition and dual-route accounts of morphological processing and in favor of the naive discriminative learning account that posits independent, morphologically unmediated, and simultaneous access to all meanings activated by orthographic cues in the visual input. We discuss selectivity and division of attention as driving forces in complex word recognition.

Negation in Sixteen Yorùbá Dialects

This paper examines the various morpho-syntactic distributions of negation in sixteen Yoruba dialects and comes up with some interesting questions, observations and claims. Negation is contextualised in the dialects; it is marked by different elements within the word and within the sentence. Some of the NEG formatives examined are used to negate the indicative expressions, others are used in the imperative mood while some others are mainly used to negate the focus marker. Nearly all the NEG Morphemes examined precede the verb except ma/mo [+NEG] which may be used at the end of the VP. This work believes that within the scope of ai [+NEG], it is not a complex negative morpheme; the low-toned “a” is regarded as the negator in the syntax of Yoruba negation. Following Ouhalla (1999), this work takes the NEG to belong to a category known as the Negative Phrase. It functions as a syntactic Head which projects into a NegP. Here, NEG is taken as an independent category which projects its own X-bar structure NegP; it inhabits a borderline between functional and lexical projections. We observe that the differences between the morphemes of negation in these sixteen Yoruba dialects are of linguistic change. We also realise in this work that in as much as morphemes of negation in Yoruba dialects commute with the aspecto-modal marker of negative polarity, they can be placed in the position of the functional category Asp. In essence, negation in the sixteen Yoruba dialects commutes with the tense/aspecto-modal nuances. The various NEG morphemes of the Yoruba dialects discussed in this paper have shown that the verbo-aspectual negative polarity subsumes very much as a strong feature.

Teaching, Learning, and Developing L2 French Sociolinguistic Competence: A Sociocultural Perspective

The study reported in this article investigates the development of sociolinguistic competence among second-year (US university-level) L2 learners of French who were given systematic instruction on sociolinguistic variation as part of their normal coursework. We focus on the variable use of the negative morpheme ne in verbal negation. Drawing from learners’ explanations of ne presence versus absence, their analyses of two texts representing different levels of discourse, and their own small-group inter-learner online chat discussions, we examine the link between conceptual understanding of variation in French and these learners’ development of conscious control over variation. We show that properly organized pedagogical activity can help learners to develop their understanding of variable features of discourse, which ultimately leads (to) the development of their performance abilities. We present both quantitative and qualitative analyses of learners’ performance to illustrate their developing control over variation in French, which begins to emerge as a sociolinguistic resource by the end of the academic term.

Negative Concord in Western Armenian

This paper examines a unique phenomena of negative concord found in Western Ar-menian (WA). When two negative morphemes appear together in the same clause, there are two possible interpretations that result cross-linguistically. Either each negative morpheme contributes a negation to the semantics, known as double nega-tion (DN) or the two morphemes surface as one instance of negation, know as neg-ative concord (NC).

The Syntax and Morphology of the Negative Morphemes [sa] in Sesotho

The Syntax and Morphology of the Negative Morphemes [sa] in Sesotho

Morphosyntactic and phonological constraints on negative particle variation in French-language chat discourse

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the variable presence or absence of the negative morphemenein online French-language chat environments. The data indicate an overwhelming preference for the omission ofnein most instances of verbal negation, which corroborates previous studies ofnein everyday conversational French. VARBRUL analyses revealed four principal results: (i) subject type (i.e., noun phrase [NP], pronoun, or inferred subject) is the most influential factor; (ii) NPs favornepresence irrespective of the conditioning factors considered in this study; (iii) the variable presence ofneis conditioned by phonological factors within the subject pronoun category; (iv) the type of second-negative present (i.e.,pasvs. second-negative other thanpas) influencesneretention in inferred subject environments.

A Duration-based Solution to the Problem of Stress Realization in Turkish

A duration-based solution to the problem of stress realization in Turkish Anne Pycha University of California, Berkeley Department of Linguistics pycha@berkeley.edu I. Introduction In this paper, I argue that the realization of Turkish stress makes crucial reference not to syllable types (such as heavy versus light), but to syllable durations. In agreement with previous work, I show that fundamental frequency (F0) acts as a primary acoustic correlate of stress in the language. Contrary to what we might expect, however, F0 contours realize themselves fully on syllables closed by a sonorant consonant (abbreviated here as CVR), but are “clipped” on syllables with long vowel nuclei (CVV). This presents a puzzle for any theory of phonological weight, whereby CVV syllables should certainly be heavier, and therefore more capable of hosting prosodic information, than CVR syllables. The puzzle resolves itself when we examine phonetic duration: the F0-carrying portion of CVV syllables is in fact consistently shorter than that of CVR syllables. Following Gordon (1999), these findings suggest that exceptions to typological tendencies in syllable weight can find a principled explanation within phonetic implementation. 2. Background Turkish has at least three ways of assigning stress (Sezer 1981, Inkelas & Orgun 1998, Inkelas 1999, Kabak & Vogel 2001, Inkelas & Orgun 2003, and references cited therein). Final stress is the default. Certain morphemes, however, condition the presence of non-final stress; an example is the negative morpheme -mA, which conditions stress on the syllable preceding itself. Place names undergo a totally different stress placement algorithm, dubbed “Sezer stress” after Sezer (1981): here, stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable if it is heavy and the penultimate syllable is light, otherwise it falls on the penultimate syllable. (1a) git-'ti-m go-P AST -1 SG ‘I went’ (1b) 'git-me-di-m go-N EG -P AST -1 SG ‘I didn’t go’ (1c) 'ankara, is'tanbul ‘Ankara’, ‘Istanbul’ In this paper, I will not consider Sezer stress, but will be concerned only with final and non-final stress. Previous researchers who have investigated the acoustic correlates of Turkish stress have concurred that F0 acts as a primary correlate (Konrot 1981, Konrot 1987, Levi 2005), but have also noted that final and non-final stress seem to get realized very differently. Konrot (1981) identified both F0 and intensity as correlates, but only in words with non-final stress. In words with final stress, he found no robust correlates at all. Levi (2005) identified F0, intensity, and duration as correlates, when averaging over words with final and non-final stress. But she too encountered the non-robustness of correlates for final stress, as revealed by her algorithm for

NEGATION IN MOKPE AND TWO RELATED COASTAL BANTU LANGUAGES OF CAMEROON

Negation has recently constituted a fascinating area of study both in descrip- tive and theoretical linguistics because of the varying positions that the negative morpheme occupies in the world's languages and the need to determine the position of this morpheme at Deep Structure. In addition, while some languages employ a single negative morpheme ubiquitously, some others employ more than three morphemes, with the use of many of the morphemes predicated on the tense of the verb. This paper investigates the structure of negative constructions in Mokpe and two related coastal Bantu languages of Cameroon. Al- though Mokpe and these other languages employ two or more negative morphemes, these morphemes are not free variants; the use of any of them is constrained by the tense/aspect of the verb under consideration. A Principles and Parameters Theory treatment of negation in Mokpe is offered.

Sentence polarity and word order in Basque

This paper argues for a new understanding of polarity-sensitive word order alternations in Basque, within a theory of grammar that assumes antisymmetry (Kayne 1994) and only XP movement. Drawing on Cinque's (1999) universal hierarchy of functional heads it argues that the negative order - Neg-Aux-V - is derivationally prior. The affirmative V-Aux order is produced by raising of the VP to a position called PolP, which also hosts the negative morpheme ez, in negative sentences, and the emphatic marker, ba, in emphatic affirmatives. An empirical advantage of this proposal over underlyingly mixed-head approaches to Basque (Laka 1990, Elordieta 2000) is its ability to explain scope taking between negation and evidential particles.