Blackwell Publishing Ltd Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 027
Negation in Natural Language: On the Form
and Meaning of Negative Elements
Hedde Zeijlstra*
University of Amsterdam
Abstract
A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation. Every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of a certain sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the position of negative elements, also the form of negative elements and the interpretation of sentences that consist of multiple negative elements are subject to broad cross-linguistic variation. The study to the behaviour of sentential negation has therefore strongly been guided by the question as to what determines the possible ways that sentential negation can manifest itself. A conclusion of the article will be that the behaviour of negation in natural language strongly deviates from what intuitively might be expected.
1. Introduction
A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation. Every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of affirmative sentences. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the position of negative elements, the form of negative elements and the interpretation of sentences that consist of multiple negative elements are also subject to broad cross-linguistic variation. The study of the behaviour of sentential negation has therefore strongly been guided by the question as to what determines the possible ways that sentential negation can manifest itself.
deal with a notorious problem in the study of the syntax-semantics interface: Why do sentences containing two (or more) negative elements in most languages often not yield two (or more) semantic negations, but only one. The study of this phenomenon, dubbed negative concord, has dominated the study of negation more than 15 years, and it has led to a number of different analyses, which will be discussed and evaluated in this section. As negative concord directly concerns the semantic status of negative elements and it has been a central topic of research in recent years, it can be seen as a prototypical example of studies of negation in natural language. For this reason the different analyses of negative concord that have been presented in recent years will be discussed in more detail so that the reader may get an impression of what is currently going on in the field. Section 4, finally, concludes the article.
2. On the Form of Negative Elements: Negative Markers
A property of natural language is that every natural language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth conditions of an affirmative sentence. Take for instance the following two sentences:
(1) a. Anna is at home b. Anna is not at home
Sentence (1a) is true if and only if (1b) is not and vice versa. Sentence (1b) means that ‘it is not the case that Anna is at home’. However, if negation applies to entire sentences, why does it not occur in a sentence-initial position? Why do negative sentences not have a form like (2)?
(2) Not: Anna is at home
The position and form of the negative marker in natural language deviate from what would be intuitively expected. Negative markers usually do not show up in sentence-initial position. Moreover, negative markers are quite often not even separate words but are attached to other words (mostly verbs). In the Czech translation of (1b), the negative marker ne is attached to verb ní (is).
(3) Anna není doma Czech
Anna neg.is at.home ‘Anna is not at home’
2.1THE FORM OFNEGATIVE MARKERS
A first observation, noted in Horn’s seminal work on negation (1989), on the form of negative sentences is that the expression of a negative sentence is always marked in comparison to its affirmative counterpart. There is no language in the world in which affirmative sentences are marked and negative ones are not (see also Dahl 1979; Payne 1985). In this respect negative and affirmative sentences are not symmetric in natural language.
As it is always the negative sentence that is marked, the following question that rises is how these sentences can be marked. Languages exhibit different ways of expressing sentential negation. However, the number of these different ways is restricted. Two different strategies for the expression of negation can be distinguished. The first strategy is exhibited by languages that employ special verbs that negate a sentence such as Evenki (spoken in Siberia) and Tongan (a Polynesian language) with negative verbs that take an entire clause as their complement.
(4) a. Bi ∂∂w dukuwunma dukura Evenki
I neg.past.1sg letterwrite
‘I “notted” to write the letter’ = ‘I did not write a letter.’
b. Na’e ‘ikai ke ‘alu ‘a Siale Tongan
Asp neg asp go abs Charlie
‘It “notted” that Chary went’ = ‘Charlie did not go.’1
The second strategy uses negative particles to express sentential negation. Negative particles come in different kinds. Following much of the terminology from Zanuttini (1997, 2001) and Zeijlstra (2004), one can distinguish the following three kinds of negative markers: (i) adverbial negative markers, (ii) preverbal negative markers, and (iii) affixal negative markers.
The first class of negative particles consists of adverbial negative markers. Those negative markers occur both in preverbal and postverbal position as is shown for German in (5).
(5) a. Hans kommt nicht German
Hans comes neg (adverbial)
‘Hans does not come’ b. . . . dass Hans nicht kommt
. . . that Hans neg comes ‘. . . that Hans does not come’
(6) a. Milan nevolá Czech
Milan neg.calls (weak particle)
‘Milan does not call’
b. Gianni non ha telefonato Italian
Gianni neg has called (strong particle)
‘Gianni did not call’
In both examples the negative marker shows up in a position imme-diately to the left of the finite verb. In Czech the negative marker is really phonologically attached to the finite verb. In Italian, however, the negative marker seems to be a separate word. The examples above show that the class of preverbal negative markers is not homogenous.2
Affixal negative particles are those markers that participate in the verbal inflectional system. An example is Turkish, in which sentential negation is expressed by means of a negative affix me that is located between the verbal stem and the temporal and personal inflection.
(7) John elmalari sevmedi3 Turkish
John apples like.neg.past.3sg ‘John does not like the apples’
A final remark needs to be made about the occurrence of multiple negative markers. Many languages allow more than one negative marker to appear in negative clauses. Catalan, for example, has apart from its preverbal negative marker the possibility of including a second addi-tional negative marker pas in negative expressions. In Standard French the co-occurrence of a preverbal and an adverbial negative marker is even obligatory. In West Flemish negative clauses the negative adverb
nie is obligatory, and the preverbal negative marker en is optional (8).
(8) a. No serà (pas) facil Catalan
Neg be.fut.3sgneg easy ‘It will not be easy’
b. Jean ne mange pas French
Jean neg eats neg
‘Jean does not eat’
c. Valère (en) klaapt nie West Flemish
Valère neg talks neg
‘Valère does not talk’
marker, from which they may change back into a stage with only a preverbal negative marker. The languages in (8) are in different stages of this cycle. This process is known as Jespersen’s Cycle (after Dahl 1979) and formulated by Jespersen as follows:
The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation; the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word ( Jespersen 1917: 4).
A number of analyses have been presented to account for the range of variation that one attests cross-linguistically (both synchronically and diachronically) with respect to the expression of sentential negation ( Jespersen 1917; Klima 1964; Horn 1989; Laka 1990; Ouhalla 1990; Haegeman 1995; Zanuttini 1997; Van Kemenade 1999; Zeijlstra 2004; Condoravdi and Kiparsky 2005; De Swart 2006; among many others). However, this range of variation is not unique to negation. The cross-linguistic variation that is attested in the domain of negation shows close resemblance to, for instance, marking of tense, aspect and mood, which exhibit similar ranges of variation. English past tense, for instance, is expressed by means of an affixal tense marker, -ed, just like Turkish uses affixal negative markers to express negation. Lilloet Salish, a Native American language spoken in British Columbia, on the other hand, has no affixes for past and present tense and expresses this difference by using adverbial temporal markers, such as now or yesterday (cf. Matthewson 2006). The expression of tense in this language is thus similar to the expression of negation in a language like German, which uses only an adverb like nicht
(not) or negative quantifiers [i.e. words like niemand (nobody) or nichts
(nothing), etc.]. For this reason most researchers consider negation a syntactic category, similar to tense, aspect or mood.
2.2THE POSITION OF NEGATIVEMARKERS
Pollock (1989) and Haegeman (1995) argue that negative markers stand in a fixed order with tense markers whereas Ouhalla (1990), Ramchand (2003) and Zeijlstra (2004) propose a more flexible approach where languages vary with respect to the order between temporal and negative markers. Zanuttini (1997) proposes a more fine-grained clausal structure consisting of multiple available positions for tense and negation markers.
The fact that the position of negative markers is restricted to what is traditionally called the Middle Field (the area where other syntactic categories such as tense and aspect operate) may shed more light on a question that Jespersen addressed back in 1917: if the entire sentence is negated, why does the negative marker not appear in front of the entire sentence ( Jespersen 1917: 86)? This does not only hold for languages like English or other European languages. Dahl (1979) reports that the base position of negative markers is never found in the real sentence-initial position, and similar observations have been reported in Han (2001) and Zeijlstra (2006a). That does not mean that negative markers may not occur in that position. If, for instance, a negative marker is always attached to the left of a finite verb and the sentence starts with such a verb, the negative marker also stands at the beginning of the sentence. However, in such a language (again, Czech could be an example) one cannot say that the base position of the negative marker is the sentence-initial position; its base position is just left of the finite verb.
That negation occupies a position in the Middle Field and not the sentence border is also illustrated by the following phenomenon in Dutch. In this language there is always one constituent left of the finite verb (at least in affirmative main clauses). Whereas most adverbs are allowed to occur in that position, where they receive some extra emphasis, this is forbidden for the Dutch adverbial negative marker niet
(not), as demonstrated in Hoeksema (1997) and Barbiers (2002):
(9) a. Vaak gaat Jan naar huis Dutch
Often goes Jan to home ‘John does not go often’ b. *Niet gaat Jan naar huis
Neg goes Jan to home ‘John does not go home’
2.3 CONCLUDINGREMARKS
the way in which tense is expressed, rather than some operator applying to an entire sentence.
3. On the Meaning of Negative Elements: Negative Concord
Not only syntactic properties, such as form and position, but also the semantic behaviour of negative elements deviates from what one would expect. Another well-investigated phenomenon in this area concerns the interpretation of sentences with more than one negative element. Take for instance the following Italian examples:
(10) a. Gianni non ha telefonato Italian
Gianni neg has called ‘Gianni did not call’ b. Nessuno ha telefonato
N-body has called ‘Nobody called’
In (10a) the negation seems to be introduced by non. The sentence without non simply means Gianni called. In (10b) nessuno acts like a negative quantifier, such as English nobody, and thus induces the semantic negation. However, if the two are combined in a sentence, only one semantic negation is yielded although two negations would be expected.
(11) Gianni non ha telefonato a nessuno Italian
Gianni neg has called to n-body ‘Gianni did not call anybody’
The phenomenon where two (or more) negative elements that are able to express negation in isolation yield a single semantic negation is called Negative Concord after Labov (1972). Languages that do not exhibit Negative Concord are called Double Negation languages. Negative Concord is attested in a large variety of languages. Within the Indo-European language family most languages exhibit Negative Concord: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Polish, Albanian and Greek, Afrikaans, West Flemish, Yiddish, to mention just a few, are all Negative Concord languages. Dutch, German, Swedish and Norwegian are not.
in preverbal position, either an n-word or a negative marker. Examples are below:
(12) a. Milan *(ne-)vidi nikoho Czech
Milan neg.saw n-body (strict Negative Concord)
‘Milan does not see anybody’ b. Dnes *(ne-)volá nikdo
Today neg.calls n-body ‘Today nobody calls’
c. Dnes nikdo *(ne-)volá
Today n-body neg.calls ‘Today nobody calls’
(13) a. Gianni *(non) ha telefonato a nessuno Italian
Gianni neg has called to n-body (non-strict Negative Concord) ‘Gianni did not call anybody’
b. Ieri *(non) ha telefonato nessuno Yesterday neg has called n-body ‘Yesterday nobody called’
c. Ieri nessuno (*non) ha telefonato (a nessuno) Yesterday n-body neg has called to n-body ‘Yesterday nobody called (anybody)’
The reader should note that this typology of Negative Concord languages is not exhaustive. In languages like West Flemish and Afrikaans, Negative Concord is allowed to occur, but it is not obligatory (Den Besten 1989; Haegeman 1995). In those languages negative markers may accompany n-words, but they do not have to. In French and Romanian the combination of two n-words gives rise to ambiguity between a Negative Concord reading and a reading with two semantic negations, standardly referred to as a Double Negation reading (De Swart and Sag 2002; Falaus 2006). French is also unique in that only one of its two negative markers, the preverbal particle ne, is allowed to occur in Negative Concord relations. The postverbal negative marker
pas may never do so (Rowlett 1998; Corblin and Tovena 2001; De Swart and Sag 2002).
languages. The question as to why multiple negative elements may give rise to only one semantic negation in some languages is thus not only relevant for the study of the behaviour of the meaning of negative elements but lies at the heart of the study of the relation between syntax and semantics.
In order to solve this problem several approaches have been proposed. The three most influential proposals are (i) the negative quantifier approach, (ii) the negative polarity approach, and (iii) the syntactic agreement approach. In the remainder of this section, I briefly discuss and evaluate these three approaches.
3.1THE NEGATIVEQUANTIFIER APPROACH
One proposal, which takes all negative elements to be semantically negative, goes back to Haegeman and Zanuttini (1991, 1996), Zanuttini (1991), Haegeman (1995), De Swart and Sag (2002) and Szabolcsi (2004). In these proposals, it is argued that Negative Concord is an instance of so-called quantifier resumption (May 1989). Quantifier resumption can be explained as follows:
(14) Three girls called three boys
This sentence is ambiguous. In one interpretation each girl called three boys, but another available interpretation is one in which each girl called exactly one boy. The latter explanation could be rephrased as ‘There are three girl-boy pairs such that the girl called the boy’. This process in which the two expressions starting with
three (three girls and three boys) melt together in an expression that contains only a single three, namely, three girl-boy pairs is called quantifier resumption.
According to De Swart and Sag (2002), quantifier resumption is always available as a mode of interpretation when a sentence contains two negative quantifiers. This means that every sentence that contains two negative quantifiers has two different readings. Take the following sentence for instance:
(15) No girl called no boy
expression and that independent principles determine whether a language allows for both interpretations or only one.
De Swart and Sag’s proposal was based on French, which is a language in which expression with multiple negative elements are indeed ambi-guous between a Double Negation and a Negative Concord reading, as shown in (16).
(16) Personne aime personne4 French
N-body loves n-body
Double Negation: ‘Nobody loves nobody’ Negative Concord: ‘Nobody loves anybody’
De Swart and Sag correctly argue that alternative analyses that have tried to derive the ambiguity of these readings have faced problems in doing so. However, languages rarely exhibit this ambiguity between Double Negation and Negative Concord readings. French is typologically exceptional in this respect. Most languages assign to constructions as in (16) either a Negative Concord reading or a Double Negation reading, but not both. The question is thus what narrows down the number of possible interpretations in individual languages?
In De Swart (2006), a syntactic analysis has been developed that operates on top of the semantic account for Negative Concord pre-sented in De Swart and Sag (2002). In this article, De Swart argues that the Double Negation–Negative Concord distinction is due to two conflicting constraints applying to natural language. One constraint favours marking of every argument under the scope of negation; the other constraint requires every negatively marked element to receive a negative interpretation. De Swart (2006) argues that languages vary with respect to the internal strength of these two conflicting constraints.5
In languages like Italian, the first constraint is stronger than the second one; therefore, Italian assigns a Negative Concord interpretation to multiple negative constructions. If the relative ranking is reverse, like in Dutch, a Double Negation reading will be assigned. In French the two constraints are said to be equally strong and therefore (16) is ambiguous.
Note that as most Negative Concord languages allow their negative markers to participate in Negative Concord constructions, the negative quantifier approach must also extend to negative markers. De Swart and Sag propose that negative markers should be considered as a particular type of negative quantifier. This would account for the fact that in strict Negative Concord languages the negative marker also participates in Negative Concord constructions. However, not in every language are negative markers allowed to participate in a Negative Concord construction. In French the negative marker pas may never occur in a Negative Concord construction:
(17) Personne (n’) arrive pas French
N-body (neg) comes neg
Double Negation: ‘Nobody does not arrive’
In order to account for this behaviour of French pas, De Swart and Sag argue that negative markers undergoing resumption do not contribute at all to the semantics (if pas could participate in a Negative Concord construction, it would not alter its semantics in any way). As there is no functional motivation for inclusion of negative markers (such as French pas or Czech ne) in Negative Concord constructions, nothing forbids or forces Negative Concord languages to do so. Languages may thus vary as to whether they allow negative markers in Negative Concord constructions or not.
A crucial property of de Swart and Corblin’s (2002) is that it separates the mechanism behind the possible interpretations of sentences con-sisting of multiple negative elements (quantifier resumption) from the mechanism behind the cross-linguistic variation with respect to Negative Concord. As De Swart (2006: 17) puts it: ‘the position and distribution of the marker of sentential negation in negative concord is relevant for syntax but does not affect the semantics.’ In other words, the question whether a language is a Negative Concord language or not is independent of the type of negative marker it has. Apart from the question whether it would be preferable to have one theory accounting for the occurrence and distribution of Negative Concord constructions instead of two, several scholars argued that the syntactic behaviour of negative markers and the occurrence of Negative Concord are not two independent phenomena. For instance, Zeijlstra (2004, 2006b) claims that every language with a marker that is either an affixal negative marker or a weak or strong preverbal negative marker (using the terminology discussed in Section 2.1) also exhibits Negative Concord. Such a relation cannot follow from the kind of approach that De Swart and Sag (2002) propose.
Another criticism of this approach is that Negative Concord is not always restricted to negative markers and n-words, contrary to what De Swart and Sag (2002) argue for. In (18) for instance the Spanish verb
Concord relations with n-words although these elements are not negative quantifiers. Those examples form a major problem for theories that take n-words to be negative quantifiers. Without adopting additional assumptions the verb to doubt or the preposition without cannot undergo resumption with negative quantifiers.
(18) a. Dudo que vayan a encontrar nada Spanish
Doubt that go to find n-thing ‘I doubt that they will find anything’ b. Sin nadie
Without n-body ‘Without anybody’
These considerations have inspired other researchers to think differently about Negative Concord and to see whether they can explain Negative Concord as a result of the semantic properties of n-words and negative markers.
3.2 THE NEGATIVEPOLARITY APPROACH
The English translations of the Negative Concord examples in the previous sections all contained words like anybody or anything. These English words have a very characteristic property: they can only occur in particular contexts. This is shown in (19). The word anybody
may not occur in normal affirmative sentence but may occur in negative sentences.
(19) a. *John saw anybody b. John did not see anybody
Because of the fact that these words may generally only occur in negative contexts, these words are called negative polarity items (NPI). In more technical terms, anybody in (19b) is said to be licensed by the negation not. In this sense NPIs are quite close to n-words. Take for instance the Italian example in (20a) which has the same meaning as English (20b).
(20) a. Gianni *(non) ha telefonato a nessuno Italian
b. Gianni has*(not) called anybody
In this example nessuno and anybody share two important properties: (i) they are interpreted as semantically non-negative indefinites, and (ii) they must be licensed by negation (non and not, respectively). The similarities between NPIs and n-words do not end with these two pro-perties. A third striking parallel between NPIs and n-words is that both can appear in constructions with verbs like to doubt or prepositions like
Given these strong similarities between NPIs and n-words (or polarity and Negative Concord) and in order to solve problems introduced by (18), several scholars have proposed that n-words are in fact special kinds of NPIs ( Ladusaw 1992; Giannakidou 2000). If the lexical semantics of elements such as Italian nessuno is actually anybody instead of nobody, the proper readings in (18) and (20) immediately follow. However, such an approach faces two immediate problems.
First, if n-words are semantically non-negative, how can the readings of sentences such as (10b) [repeated as (21) below], where a single n-word induces semantic negation, be derived?
(21) Nessuno ha telefonato Italian
N-body has called ‘Nobody called’
Where does the negation come from in (21) if nessuno is semantically non-negative? In an influential proposal by Ladusaw (1992), n-words are said to differ from plain NPIs in the sense that they are self-licensing, that is, if nothing else can license n-words, NPIs may license themselves. The question how self-licensing takes place in detail rises. Ladusaw (1992) elaborated two proposals in different syntactic frameworks; however, in both proposals, it remains unclear how the compositionality problem is solved. The general problem with self-licensing is the following: if n-words have a property that allows them to introduce an (unpronounced) semantic negation, what prevents them from introducing more than one semantic negation in multiple negative constructions? The idea that n-words are licensed by unpronounced negations could in principal explain Negative Concord, but it needs to be clarified how this self-licensing mechanism exactly functions.
The second problem concerns the (other) differences between the licensing of plain NPIs and n-words. Two differences immediately come to mind and require closer inspection: (i) the fact that n-words but not plain NPIs may be licensed by a negative marker that follows them and (ii) the fact that n-words but not plain NPIs may constitute so-called fragmentary answers.
First, plain NPIs may only be licensed by a negative marker that precedes them. This latter constraint does not hold for n-words. Czech
nikdo may precede the negative marker ne, but English anybody may not occupy this position.
(22) a. Nikdo ne volá Czech
N-body neg.calls ‘Nobody calls’
b. *Anybody does not call
are indeed NPIs, but that they differ from the English type of NPIs, in the sense that Czech nikdo does not mean anybody but actually means
everybody. The effect of this proposed meaning change is that (22a) does not mean ‘It is not the case that anybody calls’ but ‘everybody did not call’. Although the two translations have the same meaning, the order between anybody and everybody with respect to the negative marker not
is reverse: everybody precedes it; anybody follows it. The only question then is why do all n-words not precede the negative marker. Giannakidou (2000) argues that this is due to a discrepancy between semantics and phonology. The n-words are not always pronounced where they are interpreted. According to Giannakidou (2000) as well as many others, it is a general property of quantifiers (such as everybody) that they move to another position in the sentence before they are interpreted.6
However, if n-words are semantically non-negative, how can they occur solely in a sentence as in (21)? Giannakidou (2000) is not clear in this respect as she mainly focuses on strict Negative Concord languages, where such constructions are ruled out. The only case in Greek where an n-word may occur with a corresponding negative marker is in a so-called fragmentary answer.
(23) Q: Ti ides? A: TIPOTA Greek7
What saw.2sg? N-thing
What did you see? Nothing!
Giannakidou (2000) tries to overcome the problems with self-licensing by arguing that in these cases the n-word is still licensed by the Greek negative marker dhen but that this dhen is not pronounced. The actual answer given in (23) is the full sentence (24), part of which is not pronounced as the full sentence would then repeat the question. The strikethrough indicates what is unpronounced:
(24) Q: Ti ides? A: TIPOTA dhen ida Greek
What saw.2sg? N-thing neg saw
This account, however, has been criticized by Watanabe (2004), who follows Merchant (2001) by arguing that the only words that can be left unpronounced are those whose meaning also appears in the question sentence. As idhes and ida mean the same thing (they refer to same person seeing something), ida does not have to be pronounced in the fragmentary answer, but as the question does not contain a negation, no negation can be left unpronounced in the answer. Otherwise, the answer
a present to a question what did you buy could mean ‘I did not buy a present’.8
3.3THE SYNTACTIC AGREEMENT APPROACH
Apart from above-described differences between plain NPIs and n-words, another difference between NPI licensing and Negative Concord is that NPI licensing can take place across the border of a sentential clause, but licensing of n-words cannot. N-words in a subordinate clause for instance cannot be licensed by an outside negation as opposed to real NPIs, as is shown in (25).
(25) a. *Gianni non ha dichiarato che ha visto niente Italian Gianni neg has declared that has seen n-thing
b. Gianni non ha dichiarato che ha visto alcunché Gianni neg has declared that has seen anything ‘Gianni did not declare that he saw anything’
Apparently, for the NPI alcunché it suffices that it stands in a semanti-cally negative context whereas the n-words must be really close to the negation. Given the differences between plain NPIs and n-words, Zeijlstra (2004, 2006b) has argued that despite close resemblance NPI licensing and Negative Concord are two different phenomena. He proposes a solution to the Negative Concord problem by arguing that Ladusaw (1992) is correct in assuming that n-words are semantically non-negative but that does not turn them into NPIs. In his system Italian nessuno does not mean ‘nobody’, nor does it mean ‘anybody’, but it simply means ‘a person’. Negative Concord is, in his view, then an instance of a purely syntactic phenomenon called agreement. What is meant by agreement is illustrated in (26).
(26) a. Io canto Italian
I sing.1sg
‘I sing’ b. Canto
Sing.1sg
‘I sing’
The word canto in (26a) consists of a verbal stem cant- and an affix -o
indicating that the subject is first person singular. Note that this is different from saying that the word canto means ‘I sing’. If it did, (26a) would get the bizarre interpretation ‘I I sing’. In other words, canto has some feature that says that it must stand in a relation with a subject io (I) but that it does not mean ‘I’ by itself. In technical terms, such features are called uninterpretable features (Chomsky 1995). But, as the form of the verb
canto already indicates that the subject cannot be anything else than io
(I), the subject can be left out in Italian. In (26b) the subject is left unpronounced as it is already clear what it is/should be.
an uninterpretable negative feature. Italian nessuno then simply means ‘a person’ but its uninterpretable negative feature indicates that this word must stand in a sentence with a semantically negative element. On the other hand, as it is already clear from the form of nessuno that the sentence must contain such a semantically negative element, it may be left un-pronounced, just like the subject in (26b). In Zeijlstra’s system all negative elements (n-words and negative markers) are equipped with a negative feature that is either interpretable ([iNEG]) and corresponds to a semantic negation, or is uninterpretable ([uNEG]) and requires the presence of an element that carries a feature [iNEG]. Now the Negative Concord reading in (27) as follows:
(27) Gianni non[iNEG] ha detto niente[uNEG] a nessuno[uNEG] Italian
Gianni neg has said n-thing to n-body ‘Gianni did not call anybody’
Both niente and nessuno are equipped with a feature [uNEG] and require the presence of an element that carries [iNEG]. Non carries [iNEG] and can thus fulfil these requirements. But why cannot the negative marker not be left unpronounced, as was the case with the subject in (26b)? This is due to a property of Italian, also addressed in Section 2.1, that requires every negative sentence to have some marker of negation standing to the left of the finite verb. If non were to be removed in (27), this require-ment would be violated. But if the n-word nessuno appears in front of the finite verb, this condition is already satisfied. In those cases, the negative marker is indeed superfluous and thus covert.
(28) Nessuno telefona Italian
N-body calls ‘Nobody calls’
In (28) the semantically negative element is thus phonologically empty. This means that what is pronounced in (28) is not the complete sentence. The complete sentence is as in (29), with <NEG> being the unpronounced negative element that carries [iNEG].
(29) <NEG[iNEG]> Nessuno[uNEG] telefona Italian
finite verbs starting with ne are marked for negation, and that the semantic negation therefore never needs to be pronounced.
(30) <NEG[iNEG]> Nikdo[uNEG] nevolá[uNEG] Czech
‘Nobody calls’
The difference between strict and non-strict Negative Concord languages then reduces to the featural make-up of the negative marker. This assumption also explains why n-words may appear in fragmentary answers. Take (24) again, repeated as (31).
(31) Q: Ti ides? A: <NEG[iNEG]> TIPOTA[uNEG] dhen[uNEG] ida Greek
What saw.2sg? N-thing neg saw! What did you see? Nothing!
Greek is a strict Negative Concord language, and dhen is thus semantically non-negative. This means that dhen ida and ida are seman-tically identical. Therefore, dhen may be present in the unpronounced part of the answer in (31). Just like the n-word TIPOTA, it requires the presence of a semantic negation, which is left unpronounced.
In Zeijlstra’s approach, n-words are semantically non-negative but different from NPIs, explaining why n-words behave differently from NPIs. At the same time n-words are different from negative quantifiers, thus explaining the differences that are attested between n-words and real negative quantifiers. But Zeijlstra’s approach also faces problems. Not only is the notion of phonologically empty material controversial, this approach also has hard times accounting for the ambiguity of sentences with more than one negative element that is attested in French and forms a main motivation for the quantifier resumption approach in De Swart and Sag’s (2002). Moreover, parallels between n-words and NPIs are again in need of explanation, such as the examples in (18), repeated as (32). In these cases, Zeijstra is forced to assume that words like dudo (doubt) and sin (without) also carry a feature [iNEG] although they are no real negations.
(32) a. Dudo que vayan a encontrar nada Spanish
Doubt that go to find n-thing ‘I doubt that they will find anything’ b. Sin nadie
Without n-body ‘Without anybody’
3.4SOME FINALREMARKS
more elaborate than sketched above. Moreover, more analyses have been proposed that unfortunately could not be discussed here, such as Herburger (2001), who has attempted to account for Negative Concord in terms of lexical ambiguity of n-words (in her analysis, Italian nessuno
means both ‘nobody’ and ‘anybody’). However, even on the basis of this all too brief discussion, it is safe to conclude that all three approaches can account for the Negative Concord data to quite a large extent, but at the same time all face problems, which should not be neglected. This is why Negative Concord is still nowadays a hot topic in the study of negation, and hopefully the discussion above give the reader a good impression of the problems that currently need to be tackled.
Despite the differences between these (and other) approaches to Negative Concord, it is evident that the semantic behaviour of negative elements is strikingly different from what would be expected at first sight and is still the subject of intensive debate.
4. Conclusions
In this article, both the form and meaning of negative element have been discussed, demonstrating the amazing behaviour that negation exhibits in natural language. Although every natural language exhibits a device to reverse the truth conditions of a sentence, natural languages shows a surprisingly large range with respect to the syntactic and semantic behaviour of negative elements.
The form of negation may vary along the lines of markers of non-propositional operators, such as tense markers. The distribution of the negative marker even suggests that negation should no longer be thought of as an operator that applies to entire sentences. The data from Negative Concord languages even open up the possibility that negative elements, markers and quantifiers, may be semantically non-negative.
As a result, the expression of negation in natural language exhibits a large range of variation, which deserves perhaps even more attention than it has received thus far. Further exploring this variation may shed more light on the syntactic and semantics properties of negation in natural language.
Short Biography
on True Negative Imperatives (Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics, 2006). Zeijlstra’s current research concerns the syntax, semantics and typology of so-called doubling phenomena, that is, multiple morpho-syntactic manifestations of single semantic properties. Zeijlstra received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked for the Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (Amsterdam University Press, 2005), and has occupied a postdoc position at the University of Tübingen.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Hedde Zeijlstra, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134 (lsg NTK), NL-1012 VB Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Email: zeijlstra@uva.nl.
1 Data from Payne (1985), cited in Zanuttini (2001: 513).
2 Cf. Zanuttini (1997) for an even more fine-grained overview of different kinds of preverbal
negative markers based on a survey of Romance microvariation (mostly northern Italian dialects).
3 Example from Ouhalla (1990), also cited in Zanuttini (2001).
4 According to the standard language a preverbal negative marker ne must be included in this
example. However, this additional negative marker is no longer used in most varieties of French and is therefore not included in the example. It should be noted that De Swart and Sag, following Corblin and Tovena (2001), take ne to be semantically vacuous (as opposed to all other negative elements).
5
The framework that De Swart uses here is called Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which is generally adopted to account for phonological variation among languages.
6 This mechanism, called Quantifier Raising, has been motivated to account for the
inter-pretation of sentences such as Every boy loves a girl (cf. May 1985). This sentence has two readings: ‘for every boy there is girl such that he loves her’ and ‘there is a girl such that every boy loves her’. The latter reading is said to come from a movement of a girl to a position in front of every boy after pronouncing.
7 In Greek, n-words are always stressed, hence the capitals in the examples. 8
See Giannakidou (2006) for a response to this problem.
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