The article aims to advance the general understanding of negative concord through a comparative analysis of nominal and pronominal negative concord in Jamaican and Belizean Creole, based on the ...translations of the New Testament. It supplies a general characterization of Jamaican and Belizean negative concord and then focuses on negative concord with a negator like what corresponds to English
and either a pronoun or a nominal like what corresponds to English
or
, respectively. The paper makes a strong plea for studying nominal negative concord in its own right. It shows how it differs from pronominal negative concord and for both it lays bare a variety of non-concordant patterns. It explains the variation in terms of a number of principles, one of which is what is standardly called the ‘Negative First’ principle, but it is defined in a new way. The article shows that there can be concord with definite negative nominals.
Abstract In the Jê languages standard negators tend to take a post-verbal position. This paper asks why this should be the case and therefore discusses earlier accounts relating Jê standard negators ...to either negative verbs or privative postpositions. We argue that these accounts do not have to exclude each other. In particular, we propose that an existential negator can be reanalyzed as a privative one. We also argue that if the origin of the standard negator is a verb with the meaning ‘finish’, we may be dealing with a scenario that is similar to the ‘Negative Existential Cycle’. In both, the existential negator denies the existence of a state of affairs and then turns into a standard negator. But whereas in the Negative Existential Cycle the non-existence of a state of affairs is modelled on the non-existence of an object, in the ‘new’ scenario the non-existence of a state of affairs derives from the fact that a process or event has come to an end.
Resumo Nas línguas Jê, os negadores padrão tendem a ocorrer na posição pós-verbal. Este artigo pergunta por que isso deve ser o caso e, portanto, discute análises anteriores, relacionando os negadores padrão Jê a verbos negativos ou a posposições privativas. Argumenta-se que essas duas possibilidades não são necessariamente mutuamente exclusivas. Em particular, sugerimos que um negador existencial pode vir a ser reanalisado como um negador privativo. Também argumentamos que, caso a origem do negador padrão seja um verbo com o significado de ‘terminar’, pode se tratar de um cenário semelhante ao chamado ‘Ciclo Negativo Existencial’. Em ambos esses cenários, o negador existencial serve para negar a existência de um estado de coisas, posteriormente transformando-se em um negador padrão. Mas, enquanto no Ciclo Negativo Existencial a expressão da inexistência de um estado de coisas tem por modelo a expressão da inexistência de um objeto, no ‘novo’ cenário, a inexistência de um estado de coisas é derivada do fato de um processo ou evento ter chegado ao fim.
Scalar additive operators, such as Engl. even, Fr. même, Germ. sogar, Sp. aun, and so forth, vary crosslinguistically in terms of their distributional behavior, in particular with respect to semantic ...and pragmatic properties of the sentential environment (scale-reversing vs. scale-preserving, negative vs. nonnegative). This article proposes a semantic framework for the crosslinguistic analysis of scalar additive operators and a typology based on that framework. Five major types of operators are distinguished and the distribution of these types in forty European languages is surveyed. The synchronic patterns found in the languages of the sample are interpreted in the light of historical developments in the domain of investigation, and implications for the division of labor between lexical meaning and sentential context are discussed.
•The Mixtec languages offer a complex illustration of the ‘Negative Existential Cycle’.•Negative indefinite pronouns may derive from negative existential clauses.•Negative existential indefinites, ...though rare, are found in Mixtec languages.
In Mixtec scholarship one finds hesitant claims that Mixtec standard negators (‘not’) derive from or are related to existential ones (‘there is not’). The data are complex, not least because there are several standard and existential negators. This paper confirms these claims, with reference to current typological theorizing on the “Negative Existential Cycle” and provides as full an account as possible of the effect of this cycle in Mixtec. The study also argues that the Mixtec languages show evidence for introducing a “Negative Existential Indefiniteness Cycle”. This process makes negative indefinite pronouns (like ‘nobody’) out of negative existential constructions (like ‘not exists somebody’), of which each component gets lost at the clausal level and may reappear.
Kiranti double negation van der Auwera, Johan; Vossen, Frens
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area,
01/2017, Letnik:
40, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
It is shown how Kiranti languages often express a semantically single clausal negation of a declarative verbal main clause with two clausal negators. We conjecture that the second negator ...has its origin in a copula and that the reinterpretation and integration of the copula into a negative construction follows the scenario known as a “Jespersen Cycle”.
This monograph deals with the 'aboutness' of language. First, the sense in which language 'is about' or 'reflects' both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a ...reflectionist or 'Speculative Grammarian' semantics and pragmatics. Second, the 'Speculative Grammar' idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language 'is about' the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third, the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts 'are about' their subjects, topics, and foci.
The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated ...perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying perfectivity in a given non-aspectual construction is a difference in the temporal interpretation of clauses involving that construction, licensed by the actionality class of the main predicate: while stative verbs have a present interpretation, dynamic verbs yield a non-present (past or future) interpretation. This pattern of interaction is triggered by a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘present perfective paradox’, i.e., the impossibility of aligning dynamic situations with the time of speaking while at the same time conceptualizing them in their entirety. The latter type of construal is argued to be the main function of perfective aspect. The range of non-aspectual constructions with underlying perfective semantics includes ‘iamitive’ markers, an evidential, an epistemic supposition marker, a focus marker, a polar question marker, and a declarative marker. These constructions come from typologically different and genetically unrelated languages, illustrating the cross-linguistic salience of the category of perfective aspect.
This is to count as a construction Goldberg, Adele E.; Auwera, Johan van der
Folia linguistica,
05/2012, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain ...semi-idiosyncratic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its properties are motivated by relating the construction to other well-known constructions via a default inheritance hierarchy. The article also discusses a nonproductive "object-related" construction and suggests a diachronic relationship between the two. The proposal is contrasted with word-based, semantic, and purely syntactic accounts. Adapted from the source document
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