Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives PDF

Author: Pierre Larrivée

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 3319174649

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This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.

The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi

The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi PDF

Author: Rajesh Kumar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 113550475X

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This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. The bulk of the evidence presented in this book argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. With respect to the classification of NPIs , this book also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice 'any' in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.

The Syntax of Negation

The Syntax of Negation PDF

Author: Liliane Haegeman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-03-30

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0521464927

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Demonstrates sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework, showing parallelism between negative and interrogative sentences.

Negative and Positive Polarity

Negative and Positive Polarity PDF

Author: Ljiliana Progovac

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-01-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780511554308

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In this book, Ljiljana Progovac presents cross-linguistic data on negative polarity, reflexive binding and the subjunctive mood, and proposes a unified analysis for various languages, including English and Serbian/Croatian. She argues that Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), such as 'anyone' and 'ever', are anaphoric in nature and must be bound in their governing category, while Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), such as 'someone' and 'already', are subject to Principle B of the Binding Theory. She also suggests that possible binders (and SUBJECTS) for polarity items are negation or else a polarity operator in the complementiser of questions, conditionals, and other clauses with an unfixed truth-value. Her analysis not only captures many similarities between polarity and anaphora, but also accounts for a number of hitherto unexplained facts about polarity items.

Negation and Polarity

Negation and Polarity PDF

Author: Laurence R. Horn

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2000-08-03

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0191584398

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Negation is a central feature of language and cognition, interacting with all areas of grammar as well as with the philosophy of language. Whereas there is a cross-linguistic uniformity in logical and semantic aspects of negation, there is a diversity of syntactic and morphological forms and rules. This asymmetry in function and form poses problems for syntactic and universal grammar theory and for the study of the interface between syntax and discourse. It is particularly evident in negative polarity–words and phrases which can appear only in negative sentences. The exploration of negation and negative polarity phenomena and their implications for linguistic theory are the main themes of this book.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation PDF

Author: Viviane Déprez

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 889

ISBN-13: 0198830521

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In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items

Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items PDF

Author: Jack Hoeksema

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001-05-17

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9027299161

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Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items contains a selection of papers on the semantics, acquisition and licensing behavior of negation. Negation, being one of the prevalent features of any human language, has many facets of interest to linguists, psychologists and philosophers alike. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the complicated distributional patterns of polarity items. Many of the contributions in this volume are devoted to the study of one or more of these items in langages such as English (Laurence Horn, Anita Mittwoch, Chris Kennedy), Dutch (Jack Hoeksema and Hotze Rullmann, Henny Klein, Gertjan Postma), German (Gabriel Falkenberg), Hindi (Utpal Lahiri) and Greek (Anastasia Giannakidou). In addition, some general issues surrounding negation are addressed, such as the characterization of the notion “strength of negation” (Jay Atlas), the problem of NEG-raising (Lucia Tovena), the interaction of negation and modality (Johan van der Auwera) and the acquisition of negation (Kenneth Drozd).

Polarity Sensitivity as (non) Veridical Dependency

Polarity Sensitivity as (non) Veridical Dependency PDF

Author: Anastasia Giannakidou

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9027227446

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Polarity phenomena have been known to linguists since Klima's seminal work on English negation. In this monograph Giannakidou presents a novel theory of polarity which avoids the empirical and conceptual problems of previous approaches by introducing a notion wider than negation and downward entailment: (non)veridicality. The leading idea is that the various polarity phenomena observed in language are manifestations of the dependency of certain expessions, i.e. polarity items, to the (non)veridicality of the context of appearence. Dependencies to negation or downward entailment emerge as subcases of nonveridicality.The (non)veridical dependency may be positive (licensing), or negative (anti-licensing), and arises from the sensitivity semantics of polarity items. The book is also concerned with the syntactic mapping of the sensitivity dependency. It is argued that licensing does not necessarily correspond to a requirement that the licensee be in the scope of the licenser. In some cases, for instance for the interpretation of negative concord, the reverse is required: that the licensee takes the licenser in its scope. The theory is applied to an extended set of old and new data concerning affective, free-choice dependencies, and mood choice in relative clauses. The primary focus is on Greek, but data from Dutch, English, and to a lesser extend Romance and Slavic, are also considered.

The Expression of Negation

The Expression of Negation PDF

Author: Laurence R. Horn

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 3110219298

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Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

Negative Contexts

Negative Contexts PDF

Author: Ton van der Wouden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1134773331

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This research emphasizes semantic, syntactic and pragmatic considerations illustrating a wide array of linguistic approaches. Written from within the theoretical framework of Generalized Quantifiers, the three main areas considered are collocations, polarity items and multiple negations.