M. Teresa Espinal
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
On negation. Expletive negation, negative concord and semantic dependencies.
In this talk I shall deal with Catalan and Spanish data which present two distinct linguistic phenomena: expletive negation (EN) and negative concord (NC). On the variation side, it is the case that EN is more broadly manifested in Catalan than in Spanish, and that a preverbal / postverbal NC asymmetry exists which is more clearly manifested in Spanish than in Catalan.
Several questions will be approached:
Whether there is any interesting relationship between EN and NC.
How cross-linguistic variations in EN and NC are derived from the semantic nature of n-words in these Romance languages, from the existence of specific semantic dependencies, and the internal structure of the Determiner Phrase.
On the universal side, first I shall argue that the existing variations on EN and NC licensing can be explained if, and only if, a distinct semantic status is postulated for n-words in these two languages. Relative to the negation cycle, n-words show a different status in various languages and in different dialects of the same language; both synchronically and diachronically they tend to loose the polarity item status, and they tend to acquire a strongly defined quantificational force.
Second, I shall point out that, in order to preserve a compositional analysis of the EN and the NC readings, n-words must be conceived as semantically dependent expressions: they are licensed in the semantic scope of some expression which supplies the semantic property (not exclusively the negative property) their proper interpretation depends on. In fact, those linguistic expressions which are licensed as polarity items (no and n-words) are semantically dependent either on an Xº head in EN structures or on a Negº head in NC structures.
Finally, I shall relate the sentential distribution of Catalan and Spanish n-words in NC structures to the internal structure of DP. On the one hand, postverbal n-words in both Catalan and Spanish only require a weak DP, with a numeral-like zero reading; strong Dº head is null and requires a binder, which must be a preverbal negative expression. On the other hand, preverbal n-words have a strong Dº which is filled by n-word to Dº movement (by substitution) in Spanish, but either by external licensing or a last resort n-word to strong Dº movement in Catalan. These syntactic differences will provide an explanation for the fact that while preverbal n-words can cooccur with a negative marker in Catalan, this combination is fully ungrammatical in Spanish.
Déprez, Viviane (2000), "Parallel (a)symmetries and the internal structure of negative expressions", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 18, 253-342.
Espinal, M. Teresa (2000), "On the semantic status of n-words in Catalan and Spanish", Lingua, 110, 557-580.
Giannakidou, Anastasia (2000), "Negative?concord?", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 18, 457-523.