Abstract
This paper provides a typological overview of expletive negation based on a survey of 722 languages, focusing in detail on a smaller sample of five languages. Expletive negation (EN) has been discussed extensively within Romance linguistics. This paper surveys its occurrence across languages of the world and offers a comprehensive list of EN-triggering contexts collected from French and Mandarin, comparing that list with EN triggers in Januubi, English, and Zarma-Sonrai. The paper proposes a language production and semantic account of the similarity of EN-triggering contexts found in these five languages. We propose that the meaning of EN triggers entails or strongly implies ¬p and that the activation of ¬p alongside p is what leads speakers to produce EN. Four semantic licensing conditions for EN triggers are identified and each EN-triggering context is semantically analyzed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 39-78 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | Linguistic Typology |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 May 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- English
- French
- Januubi
- Mandarin
- Zarma-Sonrai
- expletive negation
- inferences
- language production