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English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity, and Double Negation

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English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity, and Double Negation City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity, and Double Negation Frances Kathleen Blanchette Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/866 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity, and Double Negation by Frances Blanchette A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ii © 2015 Frances Blanchette All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in satisfaction of the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Christina Tortora _______________ __________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Gita Martohardjono _______________ __________________________ Date Executive Officer Christina Tortora _____________________________ Virginia Valian _____________________________ William McClure ______________________________ Chris Collins ______________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity, and Double Negation by Frances Blanchette Advisor: Christina Tortora In Negative Concord (NC) sentences, single negative meanings are expressed by two or more negative words. English speakers that use NC also employ Double Negation (DN), where two negatives yield a logical affirmative. The same speakers also use Negative Polarity Item (NPI) constructions, where words like anything and anybody depend on a preceding negation (e.g. ‘I didn’t eat anything’ vs. ‘I ate anything’). This dissertation accounts for the distributions of NC, NPI, and DN constructions in English. I apply the theory of NPIs in Postal (2005) and Collins and Postal (2014) to NC and DN. These authors argue that some NPIs have the form [NEG SOME X], with a single NEG, while others have two: [[NEG [NEG SOME]] X]. I propose that negative constituents have a structure identical to Collins and Postal’s (2014) unary NEG NPIs. Like NPI constructions, NC with a negative marker (-n’t/not) and a negative object involves syntactic NEG raising from the negative constituent. I further propose that the locus of variation between NC and NPI constructions lies at the level of morphophonological spell out. NPI constructions involve deletion of lower occurrences of a single NEG, but NC does not. Using data from the Audio-Aligned and Parsed v Corpus of Appalachian English (Tortora et al., In Progress), I show that all predictions concerning the distribution of NC, DN, and NPI constructions across clause boundaries are borne out. Two types of NC with negative subjects are also analyzed. NC declaratives like ‘didn’t nobody eat’ and ‘nobody didn’t eat’ are derived via NEG raising from a negative constituent. In these cases, NEG raising is followed by remnant raising of the negative constituent. To explain restrictions on subject type in inverted structures (‘didn’t nobody eat’), I defend a condition stating that the subject must always be negative, despite the fact that it is not always morphologically negative. Differences in usage and interpretation of negative object and negative subject constructions are derived by appeal to a remnant raising condition. The results of a gradient acceptability study support the hypothesized grammatical distinction between Subject and Object NC. vi Acknowledgments I have so many kind, generous, wonderful, and brilliant people to thank for helping me reach this stage. I begin with the members of my dissertation committee. From my first week in graduate school to today, Christina Tortora has been an amazing teacher, advocate, and role model. I cannot even begin to list the many opportunities she created for me, but I am especially grateful for the opportunity to work on The Audio- Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English. My work on this project not only provided me with crucial financial support, but it introduced me to my linguistics soul mate, English Negative Concord, and to the data set that inspired this work. My career as a linguist thus far would look very different were it not for Christina’s encouragement, support, and her entrepreneurial spirit. I am very grateful to have her as a teacher and a friend. I am also very grateful for Virginia Valian, who taught me how to design thoughtful and precise experiments, and who always encouraged and supported me in pursuing my interests. I am very grateful for the fact that she allowed me to take chances, and balanced her high expectations with support and patience. I’d also like to thank Virginia for her very important work on gender, which applies names and numbers to the frequently imperceptible forces working against women in science and academia. Virginia’s work on this issue has raised my consciousness and helped me to feel more confident in my own abilities, and I hope to one day be able to pay these gifts forward. Bill McClure introduced me to semantics, and I am very grateful for his encouragement and kindness. While I had less contact with Bill in my last few years at vii CUNY, his positive and encouraging presence has had a lasting impact, and he is one of the major reasons why I will remember CUNY fondly. I was incredibly lucky to have my last class as a doctoral student be a seminar on negation with Chris Collins at NYU. The impact of Chris’s work on mine is impossible to miss, but I am also very grateful for his teaching. His openness to all kinds of data and ideas inspired me to try new things, and his patience and kindness in correcting my mistakes inspired me to persist. I am very grateful for all of the time he put into helping me write and revise this thesis, and also for all the work he put into helping me develop as a linguist. I would also like to thank Paul Postal, whose extensive comments on my defense draft resulted in a final product that is about sixty pages shorter. I greatly appreciate the time he spent writing those comments, and I am sure that the effects of the teaching therein will be lasting. The CUNY Graduate Center has been a wonderful and interesting place to study, and I am very grateful to the Linguistics Department for allowing me to be a part of their community. Beyond my committee, I have many wonderful professors to thank. Marcel den Dikken provided a great deal of inspiration, interesting and exciting courses, and also several opportunities for developing my academic skills beyond linguistics research, for which I am very grateful. I am also grateful to Martin Chodorow for teaching a wonderful introductory course in statistics, and to Dianne Bradley for a very useful QP1 workshop. Thanks also, in no particular order, to Gita Martohardjono, Juliette Blevins, Bob Fiengo, Loraine Obler, Janet Dean Fodor, and Sam Al Khatib for helping to make the CUNY GC an engaging, exciting, and happy place to work. viii My fellow students also deserve many thanks. I am very grateful to Ignacio Montoya for his collaboration in work, and for his friendship in life. I consider myself very lucky to have found such an intelligent and kind collaborator and friend in Ignacio. I am also very grateful to Teresa O’Neill for collaboration, friendship, support, and inspiration. Thanks also to my cohort, and in particular Emily Wilson, for helping make my introduction to the field of Linguistics extra interesting and fun. I’d also like to thank fellow students Lucia Pozzan, Erin Quirk, Ahmed Shamim, Alex Funk, Marisa Nagano, Elizabeth Pratt, Michelle Johnson, Kevin Guzzo, Corbin Neuhauser, Ylana Bleller, Laurie Gluck, Chris Warnasch, Tyler Peckenpaugh, Tally Callahan, Ganga Bhavani, and all the others who provided me with help, support, camaraderie, fun times, and great conversations over the years. Last but definitely not least in the CUNY students category are my peers at Virginia Valian’s Language Acquisition Research Center at Hunter, a community that also included the incredibly helpful Professor Laura Wagner from Ohio State for a time. The LARC community provided crucial support, assistance, and feedback in all of the experimental work I conducted while at CUNY, and I could not have done any of it without their help. I would also like to thank the Appalachian linguists who have helped me, beginning with Greg Johnson. I am very lucky to have made such a wonderful friend in Greg, who regularly makes me laugh so hard it hurts. I am also very grateful to Paul Reed, Michael Montgomery, and Tiffany Williams for their help, their kindness, and their generosity. In addition to these Appalachian linguists, I would also like to thank linguist Neil Myler for his kindness, generosity, and friendship, and for helpful discussion on several different aspects of this thesis. I am also very grateful to Raffaella Zanuttini for ix her time, encouragement, and support at a time when I was just beginning to think about Negative Concord. Thanks also to Beatrice Santorini for taking the time to teach me many useful lessons about corpus research, and to Laura Staum Casasanto for her generous support and advice. I have had the opportunity to present aspects of my research at various conferences, workshops, and talks, and I would like to thank the people whose comments and work encouraged and engaged me, and changed my thinking in very important ways. I name just a small subset of them here: Beatrice Santorini, Anthony Kroch, Stephanie Harves, George Walkden, Alan Munn, Phillip Wallage, Anton Karl Ingasson, Aaron Ecay, Jim Wood, Laura Domínguez, and Elena Herburger.
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