Expletive Negation

This chapter provides the state-of-the-art around expletive negation (EN), by discussing: (i) the relationship between EN and negative concord; (ii) EN as a real negation; (iii) EN as a special formative linked to an additional evaluative/expressive layer in the semantics of language. Moreover, the chapter offers a potentially unifying analysis of EN in comparative, exclamative, and temporal clauses: EN as an operator of implicature denial. This approach derives the fact that EN is logically and compositionally independent from what is said from the fact that EN shifts the semantics of negation to the layer of implicated meaning. Some of the interpretive effects normally linked to the expressive/evaluative analysis of EN can be arguably derived as side-effects of this semantic analysis. The proposal advanced here has a number of implications regarding the relationship among morpho-syntax, pragmatic enrichment, and the non-incremental analysis of negation in theories of negation processing.

Form and Function of Negative, Tag, and Rhetorical Questions

While interrogative clauses often function as neutral requests for information, they do not always do so. We will concentrate on three question types which, besides raising an issue, convey speaker bias and in which negation and negation-dependent items play an important role: (i) biased information-seeking polar questions, (ii) tag questions, and (iii) rhetorical questions. To model the pragmatic use-conditions of these question types, a more articulated representation of discourse has been developed, encompassing different epistemic states, Common ground managing operators, complex speech acts, and/or the scoreboard discourse model.

Neg-raising

Neg-raising is “the strong tendency in many languages to attract to the main verb a negative which should logically belong to the dependent nexus [=clause]”: a speaker uttering I don’t believe that p is typically taken to have conveyed ‘I believe that not-p’. Such lower-clause understandings of higher-clause negations are possible across certain predicates (believe, think, want) but not others (realize, regret, deny) in English and other languages. Grammatical theories of Neg-raising posit a movement rule based on evidence from the interaction of higher negation with strict negative polarity items, negative inversion, negative parentheticals, and syntactic islands. Semantic and pragmatic approaches cite the relation of Neg-raising to other processes involving contrary negation in contradictory form, the availability of excluded middle presuppositions (I believe that p v I believe that not-p), the Neg-first conspiracy, and the role of politeness or euphemism in motivating Neg-raising.

The Morpho-Syntactic Nature of the Negative Marker

This chapter is dedicated to the morpho-syntactic properties of markers of sentential negation, and to the relation between such properties and other aspects of the syntax of negation. It reviews the results of cross-linguistic research and describes the different forms of negative markers (affixes, particles, auxiliary verbs, complementizers). It also discusses a number of correlations between the form of the sentential negative marker and more general structural aspects (doubling, pre- vs. postverbal negation, presence of Negative Concord).

The Role of Pragmatics in Negation Change

The long tradition of relating changes in the form and meaning of negation to pragmatics raises the questions of what precise pragmatic notions are involved, and under what conditions they relate to (stages of) evolution. Emerging clausal negators (and possibly Negative Concord Items, NCIs) introducing a new stage of the Jespersen Cycle (Dahl 1979) are categorically found in explicitly discourse-old value clauses, to lose that value at quantifiable rates of usage. Emphasis characterizes NCIs when they contain a scalar marker, compete with another synonymous NCI, or enter a clausal negative construction. The pragmatic value of declining negative markers is still unclear. Markers from other grammatical categories relating to veridicality, such as interrogations and Verum Focus markers, also associate to a categorical discourse-old value in their initial stages of evolution. By identifying known knowns but also known unknowns, the chapter encourages systematic research into the relation between pragmatics and grammatical change.

Evolution of Negative Dependencies

This chapter reviews the diachronic processes affecting indefinites in the scope of negation and other nominal elements that enter the negation system as strengtheners of the sentential negative marker. Changes involving indefinites interweave with Jespersen’s Cycle because changes in the syntactic nature of the negative marker may lead to the creation of syntactic dependencies between negative items in the clause. In turn, indefinites themselves are subject to diachronic clines and cyclical processes of change modifying their pragmatic and semantic properties and renewing their form and their featural content. A particularly intriguing systematic phenomenon leads originally positive elements to become more ‘negative’, in ways that will be explored in this chapter by means of examples from the diachrony of various languages.

The Negative Cycle and Beyond

The expression of negation shows significant typological variation, for example by adverbial particles or verbs. In some languages, the different strategies are diachronically related, and the formal expression of negation can undergo a cyclic renewal. This chapter discusses the different lexical sources for the grammaticalization of new negative markers, and the formal processes involved. It also broaches on some open questions, such as why some languages do not renew their expression of negation while others do, and why they do at different speeds.

Types of Negation

This chapter discusses the well-known dichotomies between sentence negation and constituent negation on the one hand and external negation and internal negation on the other hand. It explains how the notions differ and where they show overlap. Crucial in this discussion is the presentation and critical review of some of the most relevant tests for negation as discussed by Klima (1964). The discussion leads to the observation that both sentence negation and constituent negation are umbrella terms for multiple scopal types of negation. The chapter further shows how a careful analysis of negative morphology can be insightful in putting up a more fine-grained classification that does better justice to the reality of negative markers than captured by the well-known dichotomies.

Negation in Event Semantics

With events as dense as time, negation threatens to be trivial, unless ‘not’ is noughtly, an adverb of quantification. So revised, classical puzzles of negation in natural language are revisited, in which deviation from the logical connective, violating Excluded Middle, appears to prompt a special condition or special meaning. The language of events also contains negative event descriptions—After the flood, it not drying out ruined the basement and one could smell it not drying out—and these appear to founder on the logic of the constructions in which they occur and on reference to suspect negative events, events of not drying out. A language for event semantics with ‘not’ as noughtly resolves the puzzles surveyed—within classical logic, without ambiguity or special conditions on the meaning of ‘not’, and without a metaphysics of negative events.

Negative Predicates

The main goal of this chapter is to explain why natural language needs negative predicates to express negative contents. In contrast with syntactic negation, negative predicates exhibit some semantic properties, which are not expressed syntactically: they are complete semantically, restricted to lexical categories, and encode a negative feature. On the other hand, negative predicates are motivated pragmatically: they are stronger statements than syntactic negation; they realize, under syntactic negation, mitigated assertions; they cannot express metalinguistic negation, as syntactic negation does. One relevant semantic proposal (Horn 1989) is the distinction between two negation operators: ¬, realized syntactically, and ©, realized lexically. This chapter does not only give arguments supporting these properties, but also provides an explicit account of the relation between syntactic negation and negative predicates.