Negation and negative concord in romance
Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (4):373-417 (2002)
Abstract
This paper addresses the two interpretations that a combination ofnegative indefinites can get in concord languages like French:a concord reading, which amounts to a single negation, and a doublenegation reading. We develop an analysis within a polyadic framework,where a sequence of negative indefinites can be interpreted as aniteration of quantifiers or via resumption. The first option leadsto a scopal relation, interpreted as double negation. The secondoption leads to the construction of a polyadic negative quantifiercorresponding to the concord reading. Given that sentential negationparticipates in negative concord, we develop an extension of thepolyadic approach which can deal with non-variable binding operators,treating the contribution of negation in a concord context assemantically empty. Our semantic analysis, incorporated into agrammatical analysis formulated in HPSG, crucially relies on theassumption that quantifiers can be combined in more than one wayupon retrieval from the quantifier store. We also considercross-linguistic variation regarding the participation ofsentential negation in negative concord.DOI
10.1023/a:1020823106639
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Aquinas on Concord: "Concord Is a Union of Wills, Not of Opinions".Daniel Schwartz Porzecanski - 2003 - Review of Metaphysics 57 (1):25 - 42.
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Citations of this work
Positive polarity - negative polarity.Anna Szabolcsi - 2004 - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22 (2):409-452..
The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification.Anna Szabolcsi, Lewis Bott & Brian McElree - 2008 - Journal of Semantics 25 (4):411-450.
References found in this work
Generalized quantifiers and natural language.John Barwise & Robin Cooper - 1981 - Linguistics and Philosophy 4 (2):159--219.
First order predicate logic with generalized quantifiers.Per Lindström - 1966 - Theoria 32 (3):186--195.