Negation and its bearing on creole genesis

For the past 20 years, the question of a ˋˋcreole prototype'' has been at the center of heated debates. Among features that are claimed to be typical of creole formation is the placement of negation, which usually appears preceding tense, aspect and mood markers (e.g. McWhorter 2018). In this paper, I examine diachronic data, in particular, French compound tenses and show that the position of negation in at least French-related creoles is nothing but the result of regular grammaticalization given input. As such the expression of negation typically exemplifies coalescence of the already grammaticalized negator pas into an inflectional exponent in the creoles.

Copy raising as a lexical rule

The paper argues that there is compelling evidence for analyzing copy raising in English as a lexical rule that converts a subtype of perception verb with a stimulus subject (so-called “flip-perception” verbs) into a semantically bleached verb of mild evidentiary force, roughly equivalent to seem in some uses, which identifies the index of its external argument with the index of the pronominally expressed external argument of its complement.

Verbs of deception, point of view and polarity

The Dutch and German verbs wijsmaken/weismachen 'make wise' have an idiomatic interpretation as verbs of deception 'to fool'. As such, they have the unusual property of being contrafactive (presupposing the falsity of their complement). With second person or generic pronoun subjects, under negation and with future orientation, they are used to express disbelief on the part of the entity denoted by the indirect object. A corpus study shows this secondary use to be especially prominent in Dutch. It depends on the availability of the point of view of experiencer and is most common with first person dative objects.

Gluing idioms back together: A phraseo-combinatorial analysis

The formal analysis of idioms has been oscillating between approaches that emphasize the unit-like character of idioms and approaches that focus on the autonomy of the idioms' parts. In this paper, we summarize the main arguments for and against these two positions to then propose an account that tries to capture and combine the insights and advantages of both types of analysis. The resulting theory is heavily influenced by the approach taken in Riehemann (2001).

Case alternation in lexicalized grammar

In this paper, we propose to extend the Przepiórkowski's 2000 analysis of Long Distance Genitive of Negation to the same phenomenon in Lithuanian. We discuss the features that have their origin in Categorial Grammar. We then develop a novel analysis of the case alternation in Categorial Grammar incorporating features of the HPSG analysis. The two accounts show a surprising convergence in basic assumptions and predictions.

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).

Imperatives and Negation in Romance Languages: Verbalisation, De-verbalisation and Marking

The topic of this paper is the expression of negative directives in several Romance languages. The majority of Romance languages do not express negative directives by adding (pre-verbal) negation to the positive imperative form, but by using a different verb form (infinitive, subjunctive or something else), to which negation is attached. The present analysis shows that (some) directive verbal forms in Romance lost some hallmarks of their verbhood. The phenomenon is taken as witnessing different stages of de-verbalisation. De-verbalisation makes directive verb forms similar to interjections. The variation documented in the Romance imperatives with respect to the compatibility/incompatibility with negation may thus seen as tendencies of different degrees of the imperatives to come closer either to the verb, or to the interjection. In the context of these tendencies, the incompatibility between negation and imperatives may be explained through the concept of marking. Put briefly, imperatives require to be marked by negation but negation is or is not able to mark them.

Constraining the identification of epistemic judges across different syntactic categories

As observed at various occasions, the usage of epistemic adverbs in information seeking questions is by far more restricted than the usage of epistemic adjectives. Starting from Lyons (1977) this contrast was motivated assuming that different types of epistemic operators come with different semantics and scope positions in the utterance, namely objective vs. subjective epistemic modality. However it is not possible to define clear classes of objective epistemic modal operators in terms of clear diagnostics. It will be shown here that the contrast of acceptability is more accurately explained in terms of locality and binding properties of the variable for the attitude holder rendering the epistemic judgement. If locally bound, epistemic modal operators can be embedded, if not, they are subject to much stricter conditions in order to be interpretable.

Saying and shaking ˋNo'

In many instances, the head shake can be used instead of or in addition to verbal ˋNo'. Based on previous work on negation in dialogue, we observe head shaking as answer particles and as responding to an implicit or an exophoric (i.e., real world situation) antecedent. Exophoric head shake, however, seems to come in two flavours: with positive and with negative emotional valuation of the antecedent situation. We provide semantic analyses for all three uses (and a head nod) within an HPSG version which is implemented in Type Theory with Records and the dialogue framewok KoS. In particular, we extend on previous work by grounding ˋˋexophoric negation'' in positive or negative appraisal. Finally, we briefly speculate about differences between verbal ˋNo' and head shaking due to (the lack of) simultaneity.

The gradual erosion of NPI-hood with need verbs in Germanic

This talk addresses the puzzle why there are different ˋneed' verbs in Germanic languages, which all are lexically polysemous and which all display some extent of negative polar behaviour. Whereas all the uses of Dutch ˋhoeven' are negative polar, Modern Swedish ˋbehöva' is mostly distributionally unrestricted and only in its epistemic uses negative polar. Data suggest that this is a result of a gradual erosion of NPI-hood. The diverging behaviour of ˋneed'-verbs in Germanic languages can be most accurately managed assuming that lexical polysemy involves type hierarchy in which the different uses inherit from an abstract entry that defines semantics all these uses share. Moreover, it is concluded that if there is an NPI feature it is mandatorily inherited to all to its descendants. In languages such as Dutch this feature has scope over all uses, in languages such as Modern Swedish. it only bears scope over the epistemic uses.