Full Description
This book presents a novel overarching account of negation and negative dependencies, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition, and language change. Negation is a universal property of natural language, but languages can significantly differ in how they express it: there is variation in the form and position of negative elements, the number of manifestations of negative morphemes, and in the restrictions on the use of Negative and Positive Polarity Items. In this volume, Hedde Zeijlstra explores the hypothesis that all known syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical ways of encoding dependencies should be also be attested in the domain of negation, unless they are independently ruled out. He shows that the pluriform landscape of negative dependencies and markers of negation that emerges has broader implications for theories of syntax and semantics and their interface.
Contents
Part I. Introduction and Outline
1: Negation and negative dependencies
2: Outline: The pluriform landscape of negative dependencies
Part II. Negative Concord and Negative Quantifiers
3: Negative Concord is syntactic agreement
4: Types of Negative Concord systems
5: The flexibility of negative features
6: Diachronic developments in the domain of negation and NC
7: Negative Indefinites and split-scope readings
8: Neg-raising
9: Intermezzo. The landscape of polarity-sensitive elements: Convergence vs divergence
Part III. Polarity-Sensitivity
10: Strong vs weak Negative Polarity Items
11: Other types of NPIs
12: Not a light negation
13: Universal Quantifier PPIs
14: The landscape of PPIs
15: Negation and clause types
Part IV. Conclusions, Open Questions, and Avenues for Further Research
16: Conclusions and open questions
17: Avenues for further research
References
Index
