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Reviewed by:
  • Expression and interpretation of negation
  • Johan van der Auwera
Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology. By Henriëtte de Swart. (Studies in natural language and linguistic theory 77.) Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Pp. xvii, 279. ISBN 9789048131617. $139 (Hb).

Introduction

Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology (henceforth EINOT) by Henriëtte de Swart is to a large extent a syntactic and semantic account of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of single and double negation in European languages. The French examples in 1 to 3 illustrate the phenomena.

  1. 1.

    1. a. Il  ne  peut  venir ce  soir.

    2. b. Il  ne  peut pas  venir  ce  soir.

    3. c. Il  peut pas  venir ce  soir.

      he neg can  neg  come this evening

      ‘He can’t come tonight.’

  2. 2. Je ne  vois personne.

    I  neg see  nobody

    ‘I see nobody.’

  3. 3. C’est pas  rien.

    it.is  neg nothing

  4. ‘It is not nothing.’

The three sentences in 1 all mean the same thing. Semantically, there is only one negation. Example 1a illustrates an archaic style, 1b is standard written French, and 1c is spoken informal French. Examples 1a and 1c both have one negator, but a different one, viz. ne in 1a and pas in 1c. Example 1b has both. Diachronically, French clausal negation developed from single ne—with 1a as a relic construction—to double ne … pas and then to the progressive pas. This was called ‘Jespersen’s cycle’ by Dahl (1979:88), after Jespersen (1917). Admittedly, to say that ne … pas constitutes double marking is not fully uncontroversial, for one can doubt that ne is still negative. To keep things simple, however, I accept here the traditional view that ne is indeed negative. This ne reappears in 2, where there is arguably another negative word, viz. personne. The latter is not negative in all contexts, but at least for uses such as that in 2 most linguists consider personne to really mean ‘nobody’ and thus be negative, and 2 is then taken to have two exponents of one semantically simple negation. This kind of double negation has been called ‘negative concord’, possibly following Mathesius’s (1937:81) term ‘negation concord’. Example 3, which is as colloquial as 1c, also has two negators, pas ‘not’ and rien ‘nothing’, but now the semantics has two negations, with one canceling the other.

EINOT has seven chapters. Chs. 1 and 2 are introductions; the first introduces the issues regarding propositional negation and negative indefiniteness, and the second is an introduction to optimality theory (henceforth OT). Ch. 3 deals with propositional negation, Ch. 4 with negative indefiniteness, and Ch. 5 with the cooccurrence of propositional negation and negative indefiniteness, that is, with negative concord. Ch. 6 is about double-negation readings in languages with negative concord, and Ch. 7 is the conclusion. In this review article, I first make clear both how EINOT is similar to previous [End Page 845] studies and also how it differs, sketching the family resemblance in general terms and looking at the strength of the family ties. I then discuss the OT constraints relevant to why negation is universal and formally as well as semantically marked, and S’s account of the forces behind the placement of clausal negation relative to the verb. I also deal with so-called ‘discontinuous’ negation and negative concord, before some brief conclusions.

1. Family resemblance

EINOT can be situated in the intersection of four types of studies; see Figure 1 below. First, it joins Jespersen 1917 and Horn 1989, both of which are monograph-size studies of negation. All three address general issues regarding negation and draw strongly on Standard Average European languages. The issues are not fully identical: Horn engages in the philosophy, logic, and pragmatics of negation (and in the history of these disciplines), while Jespersen deals with everything concerning negation in English and less so ‘other languages’. But they both also deal with S’s central concern: the marking and interpretation of propositional negation and negative indefinites, and like Jespersen, S deals with diachrony as much as with synchrony.

Second, EINOT joins a small set of monograph-size typological studies with Forest 1993, Honda 1996, and Miestamo 2005a for propositional...

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