languages Article Pragmatic Uses of Negation in Chipileño Spanish (Mexico) Olga Tararova Department of Languages and Cultures, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada;
[email protected] Received: 5 May 2020; Accepted: 8 July 2020; Published: 13 July 2020 Abstract: This paper discusses two negation types (standard negation (SN), negative doubling (ND)) in Chipileño Spanish, a variety that has emerged as a result of contact between Spanish and Veneto (an Italo-Romance language) in Mexico. In Veneto, negation can be formed in two ways: preverbally (SN) and as a negative doubling (ND). Based on sporadic observation, bilingual speakers of Spanish and Veneto transfer a final no while speaking Spanish, a language that does not allow repetition of the same negator in the postverbal position. Using both a spontaneous and a controlled tasks, the results show two possibilities: preverbal negation only (no vino ‘[S/he] did not come’) and sentence final (no me gusta no ‘I do not like’) in both tasks. This study compares the findings from Chipileño Spanish to the other Romance varieties that exhibit similar cases of negation, while discussing its scope and relevance to discourse-pragmatic factors. Keywords: negative doubling; negation; Chipileño Spanish; pragmatics 1. Introduction According to Zeijlstra(2007), “a universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation ::: but it differs to quite a large extent as to how each language expresses this negation” (498). The word ‘extent’ refers to cross-linguistic variation in the form of the negative element, the position of the negative element, and its interpretation.