linguistics

English negative concord and double negation: The division of labor between syntax and pragmatics

Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single …

French negative concord and discord: An experimental investigation of contextual and prosodic disambiguation

Evidence that DN readings arise in solid NC languages more than previously thought (Déprez et al. 2015) underscore the importance of investigating the factors governing their emergence to deepen our understanding of Negative Concord. This paper …

The Roles of Context and Prosody in Disambiguating Utterances with Two Negative Expressions in French

This paper experimentally investigates the roles of context and prosody in French in disambiguating simple transitive sentences with multiple negative expressions. Our results indicate that while Negative Concord (NC) is sometimes preferred in …