Cumbersome paths to indefiniteness. Evidence from an Old Occitan customary

The central problem of this paper is the evolution of common nouns assumed to have turned into indefinite pronouns. The linguistic data have been retrieved from the Costuma d’Agen, a 13th-century Occitan Customary. The choice of this text is warranted by multiple relations obtaining between the architecture of legal codices and the presence of indefinite expressions. In this text, the contexts in which re (< Lat. acc. rem), ‘anything’ or ‘nothing’ occurs have been identified. This word is shown to be pervasive in Negative Concord (NC; under the scope of no(n), the expression of clausal negation), thereby meeting the requirements imposed upon negative polarity items (NPIs). Outside NC, re appears in conditional protases and temporal clauses introduced by ‘before’. Irrespective of the context in which it appears, Old Occitan re turns out to be fairly advanced on the grammaticalization scale: unlike its etymon, it no longer inflects for number, it does not take determiners and fails to function as a subject in the Costuma d’Agen. Comparative evidence from Gascon 13th century texts proves that, although the descendants of rem of that period occur in the same structural environments (all of them are, by then, free-choice items, FCIs), they do not evolve at the same pace as their Occitan cognate. In other words, even in neighboring linguistic zones, these expressions differ with respect to the degree of persistence of syntactic properties inherent to Latin common nouns. Finally, re is matched against other FCIs, such as hom or home ‘anybody’ or ‘nobody’ and autrui ‘someone else’ or ‘someone else’s’. Compared to re, the medieval developments of these items are far more diversified and retain more original features of their etymons. The difference is traced back to the greater conceptual salience of the animate domain.

The Expression of Negation in Sign Languages

Negation systems in sign languages have been shown to display the core grammatical properties attested for natural language negation. Negative manual signs realize clausal negation in much the same way as in spoken languages. However, the visual-gestural modality affords the possibility to encode negative marking non-manually, and sign languages vary as to whether such markers can convey negation on their own or not. Negative concord can be argued to exist between manual and non-negative markers of negation, but we also find cases of negative concord among manual signs. Negation interacts in interesting ways with other grammatical categories, and it can be encoded in irregular and affixal forms that still have sentential scope. At the same time, negation is attested in lexical morphology leading to forms that do not express sentential negation.

I can't believe it's not lexical: Deriving distributed veridicality

Given the assumption that selection is a strictly local relationship between a head and its complement, we expect the ability of a head to take a particular argument to be insensitive to linguistic material above that head. The verb believe poses a puzzle under this view: while believe ordinarily only permits declarative clausal complements, interrogative complements are allowed when believe occurs under clausal negation and can or will, and a veridical reading becomes available. I argue that this provides evidence that believe is not simply a standard Hintikkan representational belief verb, but rather is fundamentally question-embedding,and that the verb's lexical semantics, including an excluded middle presupposition, interact with the modal and negation to derive the veridicality of can't believe. I conclude that veridicality need not be lexical: the right mix of semantic ingredients can conspire to yield a veridical interpretation, even if those ingredients are distributed across multiple lexical items.

Standard negation in Awa Pit: From synchrony to diachrony

This study deals with clausal negation in Awa Pit, a Barbacoan language spoken in South America. By bringing together the data on negation from different varieties of the language, we present an analysis of synchronic patterns of negation marking. Based on the variation we suggest a number of innovations in the negation system, for which we put forward diachronic scenarios. Some innovations are likely to be contact-induced, whereas others are products of language-internal diachronic processes. The latter involve mechanisms associated with a classical ‘Jespersen Cycle’. However, Awa Pit offers us very non-classical Jespersen’s Cycles – at best. The case of Awa Pit is instructive as some of the scenarios that we suggest are likely to be relevant for other languages or languages families.

A new perspective on the shielding property of positive polarity

In certain languages, disjunctions exhibit positive polarity behavior, which Szabolcsi (2002) argues can be diagnosed via the following four properties: (i) anti-licensing: no narrow scope interpretation under a clausemate negation, (ii) rescuing: acceptable in the scope of an even number of negative operators, (iii) shielding: acceptable under a clausemate negation if a universal quantifier intervenes, and (iv) locality of anti-licensing: acceptable in the scope of an extra-clausal negation. In recent work, Nicolae (2016, 2017), building on Spector 2014, argues that what distinguishes PPI disjunctions from polarity insensitive disjunctions is the fact that PPI-disjunctions obligatorily trigger epistemic inferences. That analysis, however, only accounts for the first two PPI properties. This paper extends that analysis to account for the second two properties, concluding that they should be seen as instantiations of the same phenomena, namely shielding by a universal quantifier.

Kiranti double negation

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”.

On the typology of negative concord

This paper has three main points. First, contrary to what is often stated, negative concord is not all that frequent and certainly not the most frequent strategy to express single clausal negation in a clause with an indefinite noun phrase or adverbial in the scope of the negation. Second, the subtype of negative concord called ‘strict negative concord’ is much more frequent than the subtype of ‘non-strict negative concord’. These two claims are based on a worldwide sample of 179 languages. Third, it is argued that non-strict negative concord shows too much variation for it to be seen as the one choice of a two-way split between strict and non-strict negative concord. Given the relative rarity of non-strict negative concord, this claim is not based on the worldwide sample, but on a survey of the research literature.

The degree of grammaticalization of gotta, gonna, wanna and better: A corpus study

The paper studies the degree of grammaticalization of the structures gotta, gonna, wanna and better. The study presumes that the semantics of these structures – more precisely their modal polyfunctionality (i.e. the ability to express deontic and epistemic meaning at the same time) – has an impact on their morphosyntactic properties. Using corpora (predominantly the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and web forums, the paper studies in detail the level of independence of gotta, gonna, wanna and better from their respective auxiliaries (have and be) and the development of the operator properties of these structures typical for central modals (i.e. inversion in questions, compatibility with clausal negation and occurrence in elliptical contexts). It demonstrates that gonna and gotta are partially grammaticalized, especially with respect to the independence of their auxiliaries, but they do not syntactically behave as modals. The verb wanna behaves as a modal morphologically but not syntactically. On the other hand, better is grammaticalized to a high degree, and it does demonstrate both the morphology and syntax of central modal verbs.

The Morpho-Syntax of Clausal Negation in Rural Jordanian Arabic

In this paper, I argue that the Neg particles head their projections, and the negation in a hierarchical representation occurs between TP and VP. In future tense, I argue that the Aux can move to the Neg head just to pick the negation and then the negative particle and the Aux moves to T. I also show that speakers of RJA use different negation constructions depending on the structure and tense of the sentence. For example, the negative particle ma is a preverbal particle used with present and past verbs evenly. The negative particle ma¦-ƒ is a pre and post-verbal particle where ma is a proclitic and -ƒ is an enclitic. This particle is used with present verbs and past verbs. However, when used with present tense verbs, the proclitic ma becomes optional, whereas with past tense verbs the deletion of the proclitic ma results in an ungrammatical sentence. As for copular sentences, the particle miƒ is used to negate verbless copular sentences where there is a covert present tense verb. But, when the copular sentence is formed via a past tense verb, miƒ is no longer used. Instead, the negative construction maâ¦-ƒ is used.