Quirky negative concord

This paper explores the interaction between connective negation (‘neither ... nor’) and negative concord, an issue that has not received much attention. It looks at different ‘negative concord’ languages, viz. Croatian, Spanish, and French. The approach is synchronic; the data come from existing descriptions and from native speaker judgments. The paper describes the many idiosyncrasies but also lays bare some of the similarities.

The prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani, 2000; Jackendoff, 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving so-called negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation—with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan, 2005; Syrett, Simon, & Nisula, 2014). Our results reveal that NC readings feature a focused subject and a deaccented object, in contrast to DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses the implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

Recent changes in London English. An overview of the main lexical, grammar and discourse features of Multicultural London English (MLE)

This paper is intended to provide an overview of the main lexical, grammar and discourse features of the so-called Multicultural London English (MLE), a recent multiethnolect that can be regarded as a new development of London popular speech with the addition of traits from a pool of other sociolects and varieties of English, namely Caribbean and Jamaican English, and with a high proportion of young speakers. The data here analysed have been extracted from multiple sources, such as the London English Corpus (LOE), the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), dictionaries, magazines, films, TV series, song lyrics and social media, mainly Twitter. Particular attention is paid to those grammar and discourse features which can be considered as the most innovative, such as the quotative this is + pronoun, man used as a personal pronoun, the overuse of a set of vocatives (brother, mate, boy, guy(s), bastard, dickhead), the invariant tags innit and you get me, the adjectives proper and bare used as intensifiers, a high presence of negative vernacular forms (ain’t, third person singular don’t), never as negative preterite and a high proportion of negative concord structures. As regards lexis, a wide range of borrowings and loan words from other varieties and languages are recorded together with an excessive amount of general vague nouns and general extenders.

Nobody Doesn’t Like Negative Concord

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis argues that languages with affixal negation must be negative concord (Zeijlstra 2008). We use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether English speakers are sensitive to the status of the negative marker when learning double negation and negative concord languages. Our findings fail to provide evidence supporting this hypothesised connection. Instead, our results suggest that learners find it easier to learn negative concord languages compared to double negation languages independently of whether the negative marker is an adverb or an affix. This is in line with evidence from natural language acquisition (Thornton et al. 2016).

Neg-phrases in Eton (Bantu): An HPSG-analysis

This paper presents a study of so-called neg-phrases in Eton, a negative concord language spoken in Cameroon. These phrases strongly resemble negated noun phrases that consist of a negative determiner and a noun, however, I will show that Eton neg-phrases are built differently. Reconciling the non-negative approach to negative indefinites by Penka & Zeijlstra (2005) and the negative approach by Richter & Sailer (2004a,b, 2006), I will argue that Eton neg-phrases consist of an inherently negative modifier and a non-negative indefinite derived from a noun. Embedding the analysis in Lexical Resource Semantics, I will reveal the inherent negativity of Eton neg-phrases and account for their composition by using a lexical rule based on the semantic approach to noun phrases by Beavers (2003).

Cyclic changes to the negative coordinating conjunction from Latin to Modern French

The evolution of the negative coordinating conjunction (‘neither’/‘nor’) from Latin to Modern French instantiates a type of cyclic development that is previously undocumented as such at the level of morphosyntax, viz. a ‘semasiological’ cycle. In effect, the conjunction appears to have taken an almost perfectly circular path. Thus, in Classical Latin, as is consonant with the typological status of that language as a Double Negation language, neque/nec was exclusively used in negative contexts. Medieval French being a Negative Concord language, on the other hand, its negative coordinating conjunction, ne, a direct descendant of neque/nec, was able to develop a full range of weak negative polarity uses. In a range of contexts, ne was thus semantically equivalent to either the additive conjunction et (‘and’) or the disjunction ou (‘or’). By the end of the Classical French period, however, the conjunction (which by then takes the form ny/ni) has lost all of its weak negative polarity uses again, and it is used only in strong negatively polar environments in Modern Standard French. Based on data from the electronic corpora Frantext and Base de Français Médiéval, I analyze the three stages of this evolution. I show that, together with other developments in the French negative system, it falsifies predictions made in the literature and has consequences for the reconstruction of negative systems in less well-documented languages.

Redundancy in ELF: A Corpus-Based Study on Negative and Modal Concord

English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF) is a contact language that has attracted great attention due to its unique global role. Thus, numerous studies have been conducted to determine its characteristics, among which research on such processes as, for example, simplification, added prominence or redundancy underlying language use in the ELF context is of the main interest. Therefore, the paper aims to broaden the per- spective on redundancy in ELF, focusing on negative and modal concord in spoken and written data. With the reliance on VOICE, ELFA, and WrELFA corpora, the analysis shows that both phenomena are noticeable in ELF; however, while redundancy in terms of modal concord appears in spoken and written ELF, negative concord is characteristic only of spoken data.

Connective negation and negative concord in Balto-Slavic

With negative indefinite pronouns the Balto-Slavic languages all exhibit strict negative concord. In this study we investigate how negative concord functions in a context in which a connective negator (‘neither ... nor’) combines either phrases or clauses. We show that there are various types of non-concordant patterns.