Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T14:16:23.844Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2018

Frances Blanchette  and
Chris Collins
Frances Blanchette*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Chris Collins*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
fkb1@psu.edu
cc116@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents a novel analysis of Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI) constructions such as didn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.

Résumé

Cet article présente une nouvelle analyse des constructions d'Inversion auxiliaire négatif (NAI) telles que didn't many people eat ‘beaucoup n'ont pas mangé’, dans laquelle un auxiliaire négatif apparaît dans la position pré-sujet. La construction NAI, que l'on trouve dans les variétés d'anglais des Appalaches, des Afro-Américains et de l'ouest du Texas, a un ordre de mots qui est identique à celui d'une question oui/non, mais est prononcée et interprétée comme étant déclarative. Nous proposons que les sujets NAI sont des DP négatifs, et que la négation monte du sujet DP pour s'adjoindre à Fin (une tête fonctionnelle dans la périphérie gauche). Trois propriétés de la construction NAI motivent cette analyse: (i) les effets de gel de la portée, (ii) les types de sujets NAI possibles et impossibles, et (iii) l'incompatibilité des constructions NAI avec les interprétations de Double négation veritables. Les implications pour les théories de l'accord négatif, pour les items de polarité négative et pour la représentation de la négation sont discutées.

Keywords

Negative Auxiliary InversionEnglishnegated quantifier phrasesquantifier scope freezingNegative ConcordInversion d'auxiliaire négatifanglaisphrases de quantificateur négativesgel de la portée des quantifieursaccord négatif
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 32 - 61
Copyright
© Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks to Appalachian English speakers Gregory Johnson, Paul Reed, and Tiffany Williams for providing judgments and discussion, and for helping us to recruit participants for our online survey. We are also grateful to Lisa Green for discussion of NAI in her variety of African American English, and to Paul Postal and Christina Tortora for feedback on earlier drafts.

References

Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2002. Negation in non-standard British English: Gaps, regularizations, and asymmetries. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2005. Negative concord in British English dialects. In Aspects of English negation, ed. Iyeiri, Yoko, 113–137. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Blanchette, Frances. 2015. English negative concord, negative polarity, and double negation. Doctoral dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center. <https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002654>>Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan David, and Wurmbrand, Susi. 2012. Word order and scope: Transparent interfaces and the ¾ signature. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3): 371–421.Google Scholar
De Clercq, Karen, and Wyngaerd, Guido Vanden. 2017. Why affixal negation is syntactic. In Proceedings of the 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Kaplan, Aaron, Kaplan, Abby, McCarvel, Miranda K., and Rubin, Edward J., 151–158. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris. 2016a. Not even. Natural Language Semantics 24(4): 291–303.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris. 2018. *NEG NEG. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 3(1): 64.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris. 2017. The Distribution of Negated Quantifier Phrases. Ms., NYU.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris, and Postal, Paul M.. 2014. Classical NEG Raising: An essay on the syntax of negation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris and Postal, Paul M.. 2017. NEG Raising and Serbo-Croatian NPIs. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 62(3): 339–370.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris, Postal, Paul M., and Yeduvey, Elvis. 2017. Negative polarity items in Ewe. Journal of Linguistics 54(2): 331–365.Google Scholar
Feagin, Crawford. 1979. Variation and change in Alabama English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Foreman, John. 1999. Syntax of negative inversion in non-standard English. In Proceedings of WCCFL 17, ed. Kimary Shahin, Susan Blake, and Eun-Sook Kim. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Foreman, John. 2001. Negative inversion in West Texas English. Master's Thesis, UCLA.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa. 2002. African American English: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa. 2014. Force, focus and negation in African American English. In Micro-syntactic variation in North American English, ed. Zanuttini, Raffaella and Horn, Laurence R., 115–142. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 2012. Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and the Composition of the Left Periphery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, Jimenez-Fernandez, Angel L., and Radford, Andrew. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation. The Linguistic Review 31: 73–150.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 2001. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [1989].Google Scholar
Ingham, Richard. 2005. The loss of NEG V → C in Middle English. Linguistische Berichte 202: 171–205.Google Scholar
Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. In The structure of language, ed. Fodor, Jerry A. and Katz, Jerrold J., 246–323. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3): 199–204.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Robins, Clarence, and Lewis, John. 1968. A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City, Vol 1: Phonological and grammatical analysis. Technical Report CRP-3288, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Lasnik, Howard. 1972. Analyses of negation in English. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Lasnik, Howard. 2001. Subjects, Objects and the EPP. In Objects and other subjects: Grammatical functions, functional categories and configurationality, ed. Davies, William D. and Dubinsky, Stanley, 103–121. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Matyiku, Sabina. 2017. Semantic effects of head movement: Evidence from negative auxiliary inversion. Doctoral dissertation, Yale University.Google Scholar
Matyiku, Sabina, and McCoy, Tom. 2015. Negative Inversion. <http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/negative-inversion>. Retrieved July 7th, 2017..+Retrieved+July+7th,+2017.>Google Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1991. Contrastive negation and metalinguistic negation. In Proceedings of the 27 th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 189–206.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. 2004. Grammar of Appalachian English. In Handbook of Varieties of English: Volume 3, ed. Kortmann, Bernd and Schneider, Edgar W., 37–72. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael, and Hall, Joseph S.. 2004. Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Myler, Neil. 2015. Review of Micro-syntactic variation in North American English, ed. Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence Horn. Language 91(3): 746–750.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. The facts and nothing but: The (non-)grammaticalisation of negative exclusives in English. In Negation in the history of English, ed. van Ostade, Ingrid Tieken-Boon, Tottel, Gunnie, and van der Wurff, Wim, 167–187. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Parrott, Jeffrey. 2000. Negative inversion in African American Vernacular English: A case of optional movement? In Proceedings of the 28th Western Conference on Linguistics, vol. 11 (WECOL 1999), ed. Nancy Mae Antrim, Grant Goodall, Martha Schulte-Nafeh and Vida Samiian. Fresno, CA: California State University, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul M. 1974. On raising: One rule of English grammar and its theoretical implications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Qualtrics. 2017. Qualtrics Version: June 2017. Provo, UT. <http://www.qualtrics.com>>Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, ed. Haegeman, Liliane, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Salmon, William. 2017. Negative auxiliaries and absent expletives in Vernacular Texas English. Paper presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA.Google Scholar
Sells, Peter, Rickford, John, and Wasow, Thomas. 1996. An Optimality Theoretic approach to variation in Negative Inversion in AAVE. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14(3): 591–627.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer. 2001. Negative concord in the Old and New World: Evidence from Scotland. Language Variation and Change 13(2): 109–134.Google Scholar
Tortora, Christina, and den Dikken, Marcel. 2010. Subject agreement variation: Support for the configurational approach. Lingua 120(5): 1089–1108.Google Scholar
Tortora, Christina, Santorini, Beatrice, Blanchette, Frances, and Diertani, D.E.A.. 2017. The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE). <http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/aapcappe/>..>Google Scholar
Tubau, Susagna. 2016. Lexical variation and negative concord in traditional dialects of British English. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 19(2): 143–177.Google Scholar
Weldon, Tracey L. 1994. Variability in negation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 6(3): 359–397.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, and Christian, Donna. 1976. Appalachian speech. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella, and Bernstein, Judy. 2014. Force, focus and negation in African-American English. In Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English, ed. Zanuttini, Raffaella and Horn, Laurence R., 143–177. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar