2016. Negation and Negative Dependencies

Hedde Zeijlstra

Seminar f ¨ur Englische Philologie, Georg-August-Universit¨at G ¨ottingen, D-37073 G ¨ottingen, Germany; email: hzeijls@uni-goettingen.de

Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2016. 2:17.1–17.22

Keywords

The Annual Review of Linguistics is online at linguist.annualreviews.org

negation, negative concord, Negative Polarity Items, negative indefinites, split scope

This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125126

Abstract

Copyright c 2016 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Languages may vary greatly in the way they express negation. Most lan- guages exploit specifically designated negative markers, such as English not. Many languages may also use negative indefinites (such as English nobody or nothing) to express negation. The behavior of these negative indefinites is subject to crosslinguistic variation: In some languages, negative markers and negative indefinites cannot express a single semantic negation (nobody didn’t come means that everybody came and not that nobody came), but in other languages they can. Languages with these properties, such as Italian, are called Negative Concord languages. In this review, I discuss the difference between negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and languages that do not. I also compare the behaviors of negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and so-called Negative Polarity Items. This article provides an accurate overview of recent developments in the study of negation and negative dependencies.

1. INTRODUCTION

A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation; in other words, every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. However, languages may differ significantly as to how they express this negation. For instance, languages may use different categorial elements in order to express negation; English, for example, apart from having the two negative markers not and -n’t may also use so-called negative indefinites (nobody, nothing, never, . . .), as is illustrated in examples 1–2:

(1a)

John did not leave

(1b)

John didn’t leave

(2a)

Nobody left

(2b)

Mary never went there

(2c)

I’d never do that Apart from this, languages can also differ in terms of the number of manifestations of negatively

marked elements. In some languages, like English, a semantic negation is realized by only one single negatively marked element, but in other languages multiple negative elements can yield a single negative meaning. In such languages, the presence of one particular negative element often depends on another one. For instance, French has two negative markers, a preverbal negative marker ne, which generally attaches to the finite verb, and a negative adverb pas. Whereas pas can render a sentence negative by itself, ne cannot do so, and always requires the presence of an additional negative element, such as pas or rien ‘nobody’:

(3a)

J ean (ne) mange *(pas) Jean

neg eats

neg

‘Jean doesn’t eat’

(3b)

J ean (ne) mange *(rien) Jean

‘Jean doesn’t eat anything’ In this sense, the behavior of ne is similar to that of so-called Negative Polarity Items (NPIs).

NPIs, such as English ever, are elements whose distribution is limited to a number of contexts, which in some sense (discussed in Section 4, below) count as negative:

(4a)

Suzanne didn’t ever leave

(4b)

Suzanne hardly ever left

(4c)

*Suzanne ever left NPIs exist in many languages and are of various kinds. They may also vary in terms of the

restrictions they impose on their licensing contexts. The distinction between negative elements and NPIs is not always clear: There is an overlap between elements that count as negative elements and elements that depend on other negative elements. The best examples of elements that are in the intersection between the sets of negative elements and elements that encode a negative dependency are the so-called n-words (after Laka 1990). N-words are negatively marked indefinites that in some contexts can render a sentence negative, but in other contexts require the presence of another

17.2 Zeijlstra 17.2 Zeijlstra

(5a) Nessuno

ha telefonato

‘Nobody called’ (5b)

Int.: ‘Nobody called’ (5c)

Non

ha telefonato

‘Nobody called’ The phenomenon where two elements that by themselves, in certain positions, can render a

sentence negative together yield one negation is called Negative Concord (NC). Scholars studying the semantics of NC focus primarily on the meaning of sentences such as example 5c: Why does this sentence mean ‘Nobody called’ and not ‘It is not the case that nobody called’? But equally (or perhaps even more) important is the question as to why such n-words yield (in Italian, at least, in postverbal position) a negative dependency: Why must they be accompanied by a preverbal negative element, like the negative marker non?

In this article, I review what I consider the most important issues in the domain of negation: NC and negative polarity. In particular, I focus on the following questions: (a) Why are certain elements able to induce a semantic negation, whereas others only encode a negative dependency, and why can some elements do both? And (b) what determines the crosslinguistic variation that can

be attested with respect to the behavior and distribution of negation and negative dependencies? This article is organized as follows. In Section 2, I introduce the various ways that languages can express negation, distinguish languages that exhibit NC from languages that lack it, and discuss some crucial differences between different types of NC languages. In Section 3, I further discuss the semantic behavior of negative indefinites in languages that lack NC. Then, in Section 4, I focus on NPIs, showing that their internal variation is much larger than generally thought, which may have strong repercussions for the ways that such elements must be analyzed.

2. NEGATION, NEGATIVE CONCORD, AND NEGATIVE QUANTIFIERS

As indicated in Section 1, a way to express sentential negation other than by means of negative markers is by using negative indefinites. This expression strategy exists in a number of languages. In Dutch, for instance, sentential negation can be expressed by including a negative indefinite, in either preverbal or postverbal position. The same applies to English, as the translations of the following examples show:

(6a) Niemand

‘Nobody sees him’ (6b)

He sees

n-body

‘He sees nobody’

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These facts strongly suggest that negative indefinites in these languages are (semantically active) negative quantifiers. Further evidence for an analysis of such negative indefinites in terms of nega- tive quantifiers comes from the fact that, when combined with a negative marker, a Dutch negative indefinite yields a so-called double-negation (DN) reading, where each morphosyntactically nega- tive element corresponds to a semantic negation. The same applies to sentences with two negative indefinites:

(7a)

J an belt

DN: ‘Jan doesn’t call nobody’ = ‘Jan calls somebody’

DN: ‘Nobody calls nobody’ = ‘Everybody calls somebody’ At the same time, in many other languages, a clause-internal combination of two elements that

can independently induce a semantic negation yields an NC reading, which contains only one semantic negation. This has been illustrated for Italian in example 5 in Section 1. Even though both non ‘not’ and nessuno ‘nobody’ receive a negative interpretation (shown in examples 8a and 8b), jointly they do not yield two semantic negations (example 8c):

ha telefonato

‘Gianni didn’t call’

(8b)

Nessuno

ha telefonato

‘Nobody called’

(8c)

Non

ha telefonato

‘Nobody called’ At first sight, the reading of example 8a seems to violate the principle of compositionality (Frege

1892, Janssen 1997). Why is it that such readings do not contain two semantic negations? However, this essentially semantic question is not the only question to be addressed. Languages also differ crosslinguistically with respect to whether they exhibit NC or not. Moreover, there are two kinds of NC languages: strict NC and nonstrict NC languages (after Giannakidou 2000). In

a nonstrict NC language, such as Italian, preverbal n-words cannot precede the negative marker, but postverbal n-words require an additional preverbal negative element:

ha telefonato

‘Yesterday nobody called’

ha telefonato

‘Yesterday nobody called’ However, in Czech, which unlike Italian is classified as a strict NC language, n-words always need

to be accompanied by a negative marker, as shown in examples 10a and 10b, regardless of whether these n-words are in preverbal or postverbal position.

17.4 Zeijlstra

(10a) Dnes

nikdo

*(ne-)vol´a

‘Today nobody calls’ (10b)

Dnes

*(ne-)vola

‘Today nobody calls’ Even though Czech and Italian differ in this respect (whether preverbal n-words can establish

an NC relation with the additional negative marker), they behave similarly with respect to the obligatoriness of NC: When the negative marker can be there, it must be there. The negative markers in examples 9b and 10 may not simply be removed. In other languages this is not the case. In West Flemish, for instance, NC is optional (Haegeman 1995, Haegeman & Zanuttini 1996):

(11) . . . da

Val`ere

Val`ere

‘. . . that Val`ere doesn’t know anybody’ Therefore, two questions have to be addressed:

How can the compositionality problem be explained? How can the range of variation that languages crosslinguistically exhibit with respect to the distribution and behavior of NC be explained?

Most accounts of NC focus on the first question and either discuss only a subclass of NC languages or leave the second question aside. However, given that, as discussed below, several different approaches may be able to address the first question, each with its own successes and shortcomings, the second question might be a way to evaluate these approaches: To what extent are the existing approaches able to capture the crosslinguistic variation attested? It is impossible to discuss all analyses of NC in this review. Therefore, I describe only two exponents of what I take to be the major approaches to NC: the Negative Quantifier Approach and the NPI Approach. Below, I first briefly introduce these approaches and then evaluate how they can account for the attested crosslinguistic variation.

2.1. The Negative Quantifier Approach

The Negative Quantifier Approach takes the fact that n-words can induce a semantic negation to heart and takes all n-words to be negative quantifiers; some kind of absorption mechanism then accounts for why two n-words (or an n-word and a negative marker) are interpreted as if there were only a single negation (Zanuttini 1991, Haegeman 1995, Haegeman & Zanuttini 1996, De Swart & Sag 2002, Watanabe 2004). Crosslinguistic variation with respect to the semantic behavior and distribution of NC then either reduces to crosslinguistic variation with respect to the availability of such semantic absorption mechanisms or should be taken to be independent from what semantically underlies NC.

I focus here on the proposal by De Swart & Sag (2002), which is based on ideas proposed by Zanuttini (1991, 1997, 2001), Haegeman (1995) and Haegeman & Zanuttini (1996). Under this approach, NC is similar to the so-called pair-list readings of multiple wh-questions. Take, for instance, example 12:

(12) Who bought what?

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The most salient reading of this sentence is not so much for which person is it the case that this person bought which thing, but rather what pairs <x,y> there are, such that person x bought thing y. An answer then could be:

John bought apples and Mary pears Thus, example 12 comes about with a reading where a single wh-operator applies to pairs of

variables. Such a reading is different from one that consists of a pair of wh-operators, each binding

a single variable.

For De Swart & Sag (2002), the exact same mechanism applies to sentences with multiple negative quantifiers. For instance, the French sentence in example 14a also has two readings: one where every negative quantifier binds a single variable and one where a single quantifier binds a pair of variables.

(14a)

Personne

(n’)aime

personne

n-body

neg loves

n-body

(14b)

DN: No one is such that they love no one ¬∃ x¬∃y love(x, y) ‘Nobody loves nobody’

(14c)

NC: No pair of people is such that one loves the other ¬∃ < x,y> love(x, y) ‘No one loves anyone’

Reading 14b amounts to a DN reading, whereas reading 14c is the NC reading. Thus, if the mech- anism responsible for the creation of the pair-list readings in multiple wh-questions (standardly referred to as quantifier resumption after May 1985) also applies to multiple negative indefinites, then it is predicted that every sentence containing two n-words must have two readings as well:

a DN reading and an NC reading. As De Swart and Sag show, this ambiguity for sentences like example 14a is indeed attested among speakers of French.

The main advantage of this proposal is that the availability of NC readings does not have to be independently accounted for but rather comes for free, once it is assumed that quantifier resump- tion applies to all kinds of quantifiers, including negative quantifiers. At the same time, the strength of this proposal is also its weakness. The prediction that every sentence containing two or more negative quantifiers is always ambiguous between an NC reading and a DN reading is too strong. Although French reflects this kind of ambiguity, similar constructions in most other languages are clearly unambiguous. Therefore, a question arises as to why languages display crosslinguistic variation in this respect. For De Swart & Sag (2002, p. 390), this is “really a question about the relation between language system and language use.” In principle, both interpretations are always available, and for these authors language usage determines which reading surfaces in the end.

However, the approach does not make any claims about the grammatical requirements behind NC. For instance, why is NC obligatory in the large majority of NC languages? Why couldn’t

a sole n-word, for instance, in preverbal position render a sentence negative by itself? How does the distinction between strict and nonstrict NC languages come about? In later work, De Swart (2010) takes these crosslinguistic differences to be a result of independently applying constraints in a system based on Optimality Theory. In brief, languages may be subject to conflicting constraints that would either (a) economize the number of manifested negations, a constraint that ranks high in DN languages, such as Dutch or English, or rather (b) require as many negative scopal dependencies to be marked as possible, resulting

17.6 Zeijlstra 17.6 Zeijlstra

A question that remains open under this approach, though, is why n-words may sometimes establish NC relations with elements that do not appear to be semantically negative. This is, for instance, the case in complement clauses of verbs expressing doubt or fear, prepositions such as without, or comparatives, as the following examples from another nonstrict NC language, Spanish (taken from Herburger 2001), illustrate:

(15a) Dudo

que

vayan

a encontar nada

n-thing ‘I doubt they will find anything’

Doubt.1 SG

that

will.3 PL . SBJ

that PRT

find

(15b)

J uan ha llegado

more late

than

ever

‘Juan has arrived later than ever’ For De Swart and Sag, all these elements must be analyzed as containing a true negation, something

that they explicitly show for French sans ‘without.’ If without underlyingly means something like not with, then this not may undergo resumption again. Still, the question remains as to why some elements that are not antiadditive may participate in NC relations and others cannot, and why languages differ with respect to this matter. Slavic languages, for instance, are more restrictive in this sense.

2.2. The Negative Polarity Item Approach

The existence of sentences such as examples 15a and 15b, however, suggests that n-words are different from plain negative quantifiers. In fact, these contexts (expressions of doubt or compar- atives) in which the n-words appear in examples 15a and 15b are all so-called downward entailing (DE) contexts: contexts in which NPIs are typically licensed (also see Section 4.1). In this sense, n-words are similar to NPIs, such as English any or ever, that may appear in exactly those contexts where an n-word does not seem to bring in a semantic negation of its own. This similarity is shown in examples 16a–c (the first two of which are translations of examples 15a and 15b), where any and ever are fine.

(16a)

I doubt they will find anything

(16b) Juan has arrived later than ever (16c)

No one loves anyone It is tempting to solve the problem regarding examples 15a and 15b by assuming that n-words

form a particular class of NPIs. The problem for such an analysis, though, is that n-words that are outside NPI-licensing contexts may not exhibit any NPI-like behavior. In such contexts, they behave instead like negative quantifiers. This is, for instance, the case with fragment answers, illustrated in examples 17a–c for Spanish (taken from Herburger 2001):

(17a) Nadie

vino

n-body

came ‘Nobody came’

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(17b)

Q:

A qui´en

viste?

A:

A nadie!/*a un alma

To whom

saw-2 SG ?

To

n-body/to

a soul (NPI)

‘Who did you see?’

‘Nobody/*anybody’

marry.1 S

with.you

‘I marry you or nobody’ This problem has been addressed by Ladusaw (1992), who concludes that the hypothesis that all

n-words are NPIs can be entertained only as long as some mechanism is available that can license these NPIs in absence of an overt negation. In other words, n-words that induce a semantic negation are nothing but NPIs, like the English any-terms, that are licensed by some covert negative operator in absence of a covert negation.

Thus, the two following questions arise: (a) What is the exact mechanism that ensures that only n-words in non-DE contexts may trigger the presence of an abstract negative operator? And (b) why do n-words have this self-licensing property, whereas all other known NPIs do not? Only if these questions can be satisfactorily answered can Ladusaw’s hypothesis be successfully pursued.

Ladusaw (1992) does not provide a full-fledged analysis of how this self-licensing mechanism can be implemented, but others have followed up on this idea. One such account, proposed by Giannakidou (2000), argues that, at least in strict NC languages, like Greek, the difference lies in the quantificational status of n-words (universal quantifiers outscoping their licenser) as opposed to plain NPIs (existential quantifiers or indefinites scoping under their licenser). Another proposal, put forward by Zeijlstra (2004, 2008) and pursued by Haegeman & Lohndal (2010), states that n- words are not plain NPIs but rather indefinites that, in contrast to NPIs, must stand in a syntactic Agree relation with a negative operator.

Zeijlstra proposes that n-words are plain indefinites that carry some uninterpretable negative feature [uNEG] that is to be checked against a higher, semantically negative element that carries an interpretable formal negative feature [iNEG]. NC, in his view, is then nothing but an instance of syntactic agreement. Because the Agree system, after Chomsky (1995, 2001), that Zeijlstra adopts allows for Multiple Agree (Ura 1996, Hiraiwa 2001), multiple n-words can be checked against a single negative operator.

Zeijlstra further assumes that, just as in other cases of syntactic agreement, the element carrying the interpretable feature may be phonologically null. A good parallel is null subjects. Whereas in some languages finite verbs do not agree with their subjects and every subject must be pronounced, other languages allow their finite verbs to agree with their subjects and allow the actual subject to

be a phonologically null element. Null subjecthood and NC, for Zeijlstra, are two sides of the same coin, as illustrated in the two sentences below for Italian. In examples 18a and 18b, some element (the n-word and the finite verb, respectively) is equipped with a feature that requires some other, possibly null element, to check it (the abstract negative operator and abstract pro, respectively):

(18a)

Op NEG[iNEG] nessuno [uNEG] telefona

(18b)

Pro [i3SG] telefona [u3SG]

Zeijlstra’s analysis thus accounts for NC in a compositional way. The question arises as to how it can account for the crosslinguistic variation that is attested with respect to NC. As for the difference between DN and NC languages, this variation reduces to whether the language exploits real negative quantifiers (in the case of DN languages) or semantically nonnegative n-words (in NC languages). Furthermore, Zeijlstra argues that the difference between strict versus nonstrict

17.8 Zeijlstra

NC results from a similar treatment of negative markers. Given that in strict NC languages n- words may precede the negative marker, negative markers in those languages should be taken to carry a [uNEG] feature as well; by contrast, the semantically active negative operator is always phonologically null. In nonstrict NC languages, the negative marker may appear only to the left of n-words (in an NC construction), and it always corresponds to the locus of the interpretation of semantic negation. Therefore, in those languages the negative marker must carry [iNEG] as well. The relevant structures for preverbal and postverbal n-words for Italian and Czech are as follows:

(19a) Op NEG[iNEG] nessuno [uNEG] telefona (19b)

Non [iNEG] telefona nessuno [uNEG]

(20a) Op NEG[iNEG] nikdo [uNEG] nevol´a [uNEG] (20b)

Op NEG[iNEG] nevol´a [uNEG] nikdo [uNEG]

2.3. Two Predictions

The Negative Quantifier Approach and the NPI Approach appear to differ in two respects. First, they differ with respect to the semantic status of n-words: Are they semantically negative or not? Second, and slightly less often observed, the two approaches differ with respect to the question whether the syntax and semantics of NC are distinct—in other words, does the syntactic behavior of n-words (such as their optional or obligatory licensing requirement by the negative marker) follow from independent mechanisms, or does the semantic behavior follow as a result of the underlying syntactic mechanism? At the same time, both approaches, as represented by the two analyses discussed above, make two clear predictions that are similar, and that are generally also made by other analyses of NC: (a) In DN languages, every negative indefinite is a negative quantifier; and (b) even if n-words are NPIs, they should form a different class of NPIs than plain NPIs do, namely NPIs that cannot be subject to any self-licensing mechanism. In Sections 3 and 4, I discuss the validity of these two predictions by introducing some challenges for them.

3. NEGATIVE QUANTIFIERS AND SPLIT-SCOPE EFFECTS

The first prediction that the previous section ended with was that in DN languages every negative indefinite is a negative quantifier. For the Negative Quantifier Approach, this is because in every language a negative indefinite is a negative quantifier; for the NPI approach, this is to distinguish NPIs from n-words and to account for the fact that in DN languages every negatively marked element induces a semantic negation.

In this section, I introduce a different phenomenon that casts doubt on the view that negative indefinites in DN languages are negative quantifiers. Take examples 21 and 22, from German and Dutch, respectively (discussed in Rullmann 1995 and Penka 2007, 2010, among others):

You must

(21a) ‘There is no tie that you are required to wear’ ¬>∃> must (21b)

‘It is required that you don’t wear a tie’ must > ¬ > ∃ (21c)

‘It is not required that you wear a tie’ ¬> must > ∃

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‘There is no nurse who they are allowed to fire’

¬>∃> may

(22b)

‘They are allowed not to fire a nurse’

may > ¬ > ∃

¬> may > ∃ In both examples, three readings are available: one reading where the entire negative indefinite

(22c)

‘They are not allowed to fire a nurse’

takes wide scope with respect to the modal verb (¬ > ∃ > must/may), one (slightly less available) reading where the entire negative indefinite takes narrow scope (must/may > ¬ > ∃), and a so- called split-scope reading where the negative part of the negative indefinite outscopes the modal but where the indefinite part still scopes under the modal (¬ > must/may > ∃). Whereas the first and second readings could simply reduce to the wide or narrow scope of the negative quantifier, the third reading cannot do so.

Independent evidence for the existence of these readings, showing that they are not simply entailed readings, can be found in example 23. German brauchen, being an NPI, must scope under negation. At the same time, when appearing in an existential construction with expletive es ‘there,’ an indefinite embedded under a modal can only take narrow scope. Consequently, both the wide- scope and narrow-scope readings of the modal in examples 23b and 23c, respectively, are ruled out. Still, the sentence is grammatical with a split-scope reading. This finding provides independent evidence for the existence of separate split-scope readings (Penka 2010).

zu sein

‘It is not required that there be a physician present’

¬> need > ∃

(23b)

*‘There is no physician who is required to be present’

¬>∃> need

(23c)

need > ¬ > ∃ Split-scope effects do not appear only in combinations with modals and negative indefinites.

*‘It is required that there be no physician present’

Object-intensional verbs also invoke split-scope readings (although the narrow-scope reading is independently ruled out; see Zimmermann 1993), as is shown in examples 24 and 25 for German and Dutch, respectively:

kein Pferd

‘Perikles is not obliged to give Socrates a horse’

¬> owe > ∃

(24b)

‘There is no horse that Perikles is obliged to give to Socrates’ ¬>∃> owe

(24c)

*‘Perikles is obliged not to give Socrates a horse’

‘Hans does not try to find a unicorn’

¬> seek > ∃

(25b)

‘There is no unicorn that Hans tries to find’

¬>∃> seek

(25c)

*‘Hans tries not to find a unicorn’

seek > ¬ > ∃

17.10 Zeijlstra

Finally, as De Swart (2000) has shown, scope splitting is not restricted to negative indefinites but may apply to all kinds of DE DPs, such as few, as shown below (note that the third reading is unavailable because Dutch hoeven ‘need’ is an NPI):

(26a) ‘They are required to fire few nurses’ ¬> need > ∃ (26b)

‘There are few nurses who they need to fire’ ¬>∃> need (26c)

*‘They need to fire few nurses’ need > ¬ > ∃ Hence, a paradox arises. Given the discussion in Section 2, the conclusion that negative indefinites

in DN languages are negative quantifiers seems unavoidable (both approaches converge on this conclusion). But such negative indefinites do not manifest the exact behavior one might expect if they are indeed negative quantifiers. Either one is forced to assume that these negative indefinites are indeed negative quantifiers but that their deviant behavior (i.e., their ability to give rise to split-scope readings) follows from something else, or one has to give up the idea that they are negative quantifiers. Under the latter perspective, either there is a third type of negative element (alongside negative quantifiers and n-words), or negative indefinites in DN languages are actually n-words that independently cannot give rise to NC readings. This final possibility would mean that it is not NC languages but rather DN languages that are the odd man out. I discuss the three positions (namely that negative indefinites in DN languages are negative quantifiers, n-words, or something else) in more detail below.

3.1. The Negative Quantifier Approach

Geurts (1999) argues that negative indefinites, at least in DN languages, are negative quantifiers, though these quantifiers do not necessarily quantify over individuals but may also quantify over kinds in the sense of Carlson (1977). This is illustrated in example 27 from German (taken from Geurts 1999):

(27) Ich

suche keine

Putzfrau

I seek

no

cleaning lady

‘I do not look for a cleaning lady’ For Geurts, both the narrow- and wide-scope readings of example 27 involve quantification over

individuals. The wide-scope reading, for instance, says that there are no cleaning ladies such that

I am looking for them. Geurts argues, however, that the sentence may also have a reading where cleaning lady refers to a kind. In this case, the sentence would mean that there is no kind-element cleaning lady such that I seek this kind or, in other words, that ‘I am not a cleaning-lady-seeker.’ That reading is equivalent to the split-scope reading: If I am not a cleaning-lady-seeker, that means that it is not the case that I am seeking a cleaning lady.

If this line of reasoning is correct, no additional assumptions have to be made in order to account for the existence of split-scope readings, and the null hypothesis that all negative indefinites in DN languages should be taken to be negative quantifiers can be maintained. However, several scholars, most notably Penka (2007, 2010), have pointed out several problems for this approach.

One problem observed by Penka is that Geurts’s account sometimes presupposes unintuitive kinds. For instance, to get the paraphrased reading of example 28, Geurts would have to appeal to the kind ‘student who attended Arnim’s lecture yesterday.’ The same applies to example 29,

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(28) Ich suche keinen Student, der

gestern

in Arnims Vorlesung war

student who yesterday in Arnim’s lecture was ‘I do not look for a student who attended Arnim’s lecture yesterday’

I seek

no

(29) Wir m ¨ussen keine zwei Autos haben

We must

no

two cars

have

‘We don’t need to have two cars’

A potentially more problematic argument is that Geurts’s approach ultimately has to allude to some sort of lexical ambiguity in order to enable negative quantifiers to quantify over both individuals and kinds. This requirement renders the Negative Quantifier Approach weaker, as it effectively introduces a third type of negative indefinite (one that quantifies over kinds), even though its original rationale was to reduce all types of negative indefinites to one. This argument does not only play a role in Geurts’s particular analysis of split-scope readings. De Swart (2000), who proposes a modification of Geurts’s account in which split-scope readings are not the result of quantification over kinds but over properties, postulates two different lexical entries of negative indefinites. However, Abels & Marti (2010) postulate only one lexical entry for negative indefinites (and other quantifiers) as quantifiers over choice functions.

3.2. The N-Word Approach

To circumvent the problems that the Negative Quantifier Approach faces in accounting for the split-scope readings of negative indefinites in DN languages, while not increasing the taxonomy of negative indefinites, Penka (2007, 2010) argues that all negative indefinites, in both NC and DN languages, are semantically nonnegative. Penka draws a parallel between NC and split-scope readings, and argues that the same process underlies both phenomena. Adopting Zeijlstra’s ver- sion of the NPI Approach to NC (where n-words are taken to be semantically nonnegative, and carry an uninterpretable negative feature [uNEG] that needs to be checked against a potentially phonologically abstract negative operator), Penka argues that in DN languages, like Dutch and German, the same process is going on, the only difference being that multiple Agree between one negation operator and multiple n-words is not allowed. In these languages, a negative operator can check off only one negatively marked indefinite. Thus, every negative indefinite is semantically nonnegative and carries a [uNEG] feature, and it needs to have its feature checked against an abstract negative operator Op NEG[iNEG] . If two negative indefinites show up in the sentence, each negative indefinite must be licensed by a separate Op NEG[iNEG].

Penka then derives split-scope readings by having the abstract negative operator outscope the intervening operator, which in turn outscopes the indefinite DP, as illustrated in example 30. Penka argues that the position of the abstract negative operator Op NEG should be PF-adjacent to the position of the n-word. In OV languages, like Dutch and German, that means that the Op NEG could occupy a VP-external position, with the n-word appearing VP-internally [example 31, next to readings where both Op NEG and the n-word are VP-external (example 32) or both VP-internal (example 33)]:

17.12 Zeijlstra

(30) . . . dass du

Op NEG keine Krawatte anziehen musst

. . . that you no

(31) dass du [ Op NEG[iNEG] [ IP [ VP [ DP keine [uNEG] Krawatte] anziehen] musst]] ¬> must > ∃ (32) dass du [ IP [ DP Op NEG[iNEG] keine [uNEG] Krawatte] [ IP [ VP anziehen] musst]] ¬ > ∃ > must (33) dass du [ IP [ VP [ DP Op NEG[iNEG] keine [uNEG] Krawatte] anziehen] musst]

must > ¬ > ∃ The advantage of Penka’s account is that it adopts an independently motivated mechanism to

account for split-scope readings, and Penka does not have to make any particular claims about the behavior of negative indefinites in DN languages. However, this analysis also faces some problems. First, Penka (2010) takes every language to exhibit formal negative features, along the lines of Zeijlstra. However, Zeijlstra’s analysis is not directly compatible with this extension. In his approach, the difference between NC and DN languages is that negative indefinites in DN languages have no formal negative features at their disposal (Zeijlstra 2004, 2008); for Zeijlstra, formal negative features can be acquired only in NC languages. Moreover, it is not clear how the crosslinguistic variation with respect to the possibility of (not) being subject to multiple Agree can

be lexically encoded. Another problem for Penka may be that her analysis does not straightforwardly extend to VO languages, even though VO languages, like English, may also exhibit split-scope effects, albeit to

a lesser extent. Iatridou & Sichel (2011) report various examples, such as example 34, which for many speakers of English yields a split-scope reading. For these authors, example 34 can mean that it is not the case that you must do some homework today:

(34) You have to do no homework today Iatridou and Sichel provide an independent account of why not every speaker accepts the split-

scope readings of example 34, suggesting that English is in principle a language that exhibits split-scope effects too, and that split-scope readings are not restricted to OV languages. However, there is no position PF-adjacent to no homework, from where the abstract operator can outscope the modal. Thus, without further modification, the English facts would be problematic for Penka’s approach.

3.3. The Decomposition Approach

An alternative way of accounting for split-scope effects is lexical decomposition, as has been proposed by Jacobs (1980) and Rullmann (1995). This approach states that a negative indefinite, such as German kein or Dutch geen, underlyingly consists of a plain negative marker and a plain indefinite. Only under PF adjacency can the two be jointly spelled out as a single morphological word, following a rule like the following (for German and for Dutch).

(35) nicht + ein → kein nicht + een → geen

Again, the split-scope reading can emerge if nicht/niet and ein/een are adjacent at PF while struc- turally separated by some additional scope-taking element at LF, much in the same way as in example 31:

www.annualreviews.org • Negation and Negative Dependencies 17.13

[Zij mogen i [niet een verpleegster [ontslaan t i ]]]

¬>∃> may

[Zij mogen [niet een verpleegster ontslaan] t i ]]

may > ¬ > ∃

¬> may > ∃ This Lexical Decomposition Approach, in its various forms, circumvents the semantic problems

[Zij mogen i niet [een verpleegster [ontslaan t i ]]]

of split-scope effects by taking the spelling out of negative indefinites to be a PF phenomenon.

A problem for such analyses is that they, again, apply only to OV languages, namely languages where a VP-external negative marker may appear to the direct left of a VP-internal object. In languages like English, however, the surface position of a negative indefinite is always lower than the position of the negative marker. Take, for instance, example 34, repeated here:

You have to do no homework today Even though this sentence may have a split-scope reading, there is no way that this split-scope

reading could have been derived from PF adjacency of the negative marker and the indefinite: The position of the negative marker must be structurally higher than the modal, whereas the modal must always appear to the left of its complement.

To solve this problem, Zeijlstra (2011) proposes a mixture of the Negative Quantifier Approach and the Lexical Decomposition Approach. In short, he posits that the negation and the indefinite merge into a negative quantifier that can further undergo quantifier raising. This process leads to two copies of the [NEG] + [INDEF] treelet. Consequently, one of these copies may be spelled out at PF as a negative indefinite along the lines of Jacobs (1980), Rullmann (1995), and Penka, whereas at the level of LF, nothing forbids the negation from being interpreted in the higher copy and the indefinite in the lower copy. The underlying LF of example 40 is then as follows, whereas the lower copy gets jointly spelled out as no homework at PF:

You [[[NEG] [INDEF]] homework] have to do [[[NEG] [INDEF]] homework] On one hand, under Zeijlstra’s (2011) account, the Lexical Decomposition Approach can be

extended to all languages, rather than only VO languages. On the other hand, this account crucially relies on the availability of negative quantifiers to undergo quantifier raising. This assumption is not uncontroversial. von Fintel & Iatridou (2003) have shown that negative indefinites cannot scope over other quantifiers, as the following example demonstrates for English:

Everybody touched no dessert

Thus, Zeijlstra’s account can be successful only if some other mechanism is responsible for ruling out the possibility of the negative indefinite to outscope the universal quantifier in sentences such as example 42.

In summary, a simple analysis of negative indefinites in DN languages as plain negative quan- tifiers has shortcomings. These can be overcome in a variety of ways, each based on specific assumptions and each facing new challenges.

17.14 Zeijlstra

4. NEGATIVE POLARITY

The first prediction of all approaches for NC, namely that negative indefinites in DN languages are negative quantifiers, is not without problems. Let us now look at the second prediction, namely that n-words should be different from plain NPIs (i.e., NPIs that, unlike n-words, cannot induce any negation of their own). First, let us look at some general properties of plain NPIs.

The best-known examples of plain NPIs are formed by the English any-terms, although many more exist (e.g., English yet, need, either, or lift a finger):

(43a) We *(didn’t) read any books (43b)

I have*(n’t) been there yet

(43c)

I need*(n’t) do that

(43d)

I *(didn’t) read the book, and John *(didn’t) either

(43e) Nobody/*somebody lifted a finger NPI-hood, however, is not restricted to English. Most if not all languages seem to display NPIs

(see Haspelmath 1997 for a nonexhaustive list), and many languages exhibit a typology of NPIs, often at least as rich as that of English.

NPIs have received wide attention from scholars of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and they have constituted a fruitful and popular research area over the past 30 years. As Ladusaw (1996) points out in a seminal overview article, the study of the behavior of NPIs has been dominated by several research questions, of which I discuss two: the licenser question and the licensee question. The licenser question aims to determine what counts as a proper NPI licensing context. The licensee question seeks to learn why certain elements are allowed to occur only in particular contexts and what distinguishes them from polarity-insensitive elements.

4.1. The Licenser Question

As examples 43a–e show, NPIs are licensed in negative contexts, but NPIs are not restricted to contexts that are negative. Examples 44a–d show that NPIs can also be licensed in various other contexts, such as restrictors of universal quantifiers, questions, and expressions like at most or hardly:

(44a)

Every student who knows anything about linguistics will join the event

(44b) Do you want any cookies? (44c)

At most three students did any homework (44d)

Mary hardly likes any cookies What, then, is the general property responsible for licensing NPIs? The first proposal, still one

of the most important and influential, that tries to reduce all NPI licensing contexts to a single semantic property (briefly introduced in Section 1.2) is Ladusaw’s (1979) proposal, based on Fauconnier (1975), that all NPI licensers are DE. DE is defined as follows (adapted from van der Wouden 1994):

(45) δ is downward entailing iff ∀ X∀Y(X ⊆ Y) → ([[δ]](Y) ⊆ [[δ]](X)). To illustrate what is meant here, let us consider examples 46–47. In example 46a, the first sentence

entails the second one, but not the other way around (example 46b). This is because the set of red shirts is a subset of the set of shirts. The entailment goes from a set to its supersets.

www.annualreviews.org • Negation and Negative Dependencies 17.15

(46a)

Mary is wearing a red shirt →

Mary is wearing a shirt

Mary is wearing a red shirt In DE contexts, the entailment relations are reversed. This is shown for the negative contexts in

(46b)

Mary is wearing a shirt

examples 47a and 47b and for some nonnegative contexts in examples 48a and 48b, where the only valid inferences are now from a set to its subsets.

(47a)

Nobody is wearing a red shirt

Nobody is wearing a shirt

Nobody is wearing a shirt

Nobody is wearing a red shirt

(47b)

John is not wearing a red shirt

John is not wearing a shirt

John is not wearing a shirt

John is not wearing a red shirt

(48a)

Every student went to bed

Every linguistics student went to bed

At most three students left early Although this proposal is considered a milestone in the study of NPIs, it faces several serious

(48b)

At most three students left

problems. It turns out that not every NPI can be licensed in every DE context, and other NPIs can be licensed outside DE contexts.

With respect to the first problem, some NPIs are subject to different licensing conditions than others. For instance, whereas the English any-terms seem to be acceptable in all DE contexts, the Dutch counterpart to any, ook maar, is ruled out in DE contexts like niet iedereen ‘not everybody’:

(49a)

Nobody/Not everybody ate anything

(49b)

Niemand/*Niet iedereen heeft

ook maar

iets

gegeten

Nobody/Not everybody

has

PRT PRT

something eaten

‘Nobody/Not everybody ate anything’ van der Wouden (1994), elaborating on Zwarts (1995), argues that DE should be considered

one layer of a negative hierarchy, where the true negation (not) forms the highest layer, followed by so-called antiadditive elements (nobody, nothing, no), followed by the next layer, DE-ness. Formally,

a function f is antiadditive iff f (A ∨ B) ⇔ ( f (A) ∧ f(B)). For example, no student is antiadditive, as no students drinks or smokes is truth-conditionally equivalent to no student drinks and no student smokes. Not every is not antiadditive, as not everybody drinks and not everybody smokes does not entail that not everybody drinks or smokes. In a situation where only John doesn’t drink and only Mary doesn’t smoke, it is indeed the case that not everybody drinks and not everybody smokes, but it is true that everybody drinks or smokes.

NPIs, then, differ with respect to which layer of negativity is qualified to license them. English any is licensed in DE contexts (and thus in all negative contexts); others are licensed only in antiadditive contexts (such as Dutch ook maar); and some NPIs can be licensed only by the sentential negative marker. An example of the last category is the Dutch idiom voor de poes, as in zij is ∗ (niet) voor de poes (‘she is not for the cat,’ meaning ‘she’s pretty tough’; see van der Wouden 1994). NPIs that can be licensed by all DE contexts are referred to as weak NPIs; NPIs that can be licensed only by antiadditive contexts are known as strong NPIs; NPIs that can co-occur only with the negative marker, like the Dutch idiom, are called superstrong NPIs.

Although these observations are all empirically correct, note that even this detailed classification should be subject to further modification. For instance, van der Wouden (1994) and Hoeksema

17.16 Zeijlstra

(2008), among others, show that Dutch NPI hoeven cannot occur in the first argument of a universal quantifier, which is DE but not antiadditive, even though it can occur in other nonantiadditive DE contexts such as weinig ‘few’:

(50a) *Iedereen

opstaan Everybody

get up ‘Everybody who needs to leave, must get up now’

(50b) Weinig

mensen hoeven

‘Few people need to leave’ For this reason, Lin et al. (2015) argue that NPIs like hoeven form another class of NPIs, in between

strong and weak NPIs. Finally, Giannakidou (1997, 1999, 2000, 2011), among others, shows that whereas DE-ness is not always a sufficient condition for NPI licensing, it is not always a necessary condition for it either. For instance, Chinese shenme ‘any’ can be licensed under modals or futurate contexts (Lin et al. 2014):

(51a) Yuehan

maybe buy

‘Maybe John has bought some book(s)’ (51b)

will go

‘John is going to buy some book tomorrow’ Apparently, DE-ness does not seem to be the weakest type of NPI-licensing context. There-

fore, Giannakidou proposes, following Zwarts (1995), to further extend the hierarchy of negative contexts by another layer of negativity, namely nonveridicality:

A propositional operator F is nonveridical if Fp does not entail or presuppose that p is true in some individual’s epistemic model (after Giannakidou 1997, 1999, 2010).

To clarify this definition, maybe in sentence 53a is a nonveridical operator, whereas unfortunately in sentence 53b is veridical because a speaker uttering sentence 53a does not take the sentence John is ill to be necessarily true, whereas a speaker uttering sentence 53b does do so.

(53a) Maybe John is ill (53b)

Unfortunately John is ill NPIs like shenme appear to be licensed by all nonveridical contexts, thus constituting another type

of NPIs, called superweak NPIs. Thus, plain NPIs exhibit a fair amount of variation with respect to the kinds of contexts that can license them, and this is not even all the variation that can be attested. N-words can also be thought of as NPIs but, again, as special types of NPIs. Under the NPI Approach to NC this interpretation is straightforward, but even the Negative Quantifier Approach has to take n-words to be NPI- like in some sense, given that, even if n-words are negative quantifiers, they still often require co-occurrence with a negative marker, which is a defining property of NPIs. Before entertaining the consequences of this variation, however, let us first consider the licensee question.

www.annualreviews.org • Negation and Negative Dependencies 17.17

4.2. The Licensee Question

Perhaps even more important than what licenses an NPI is what property an NPI has such that it can occur only in a particular type of context. This question has dominated the study of NPI licensing over the past 20 years.

Two types of approaches have been formulated to address this question. For some scholars, NPI-hood reduces to some semantic and/or pragmatic requirement that NPIs can be felicitously uttered only in negative contexts of some sort (DE, antiadditive, or nonveridical). For others, the answer lies in syntax or the lexicon; in other words, NPIs are accompanied by some syntactic or lexical requirement that forces them appear in negative environments only.

4.2.1. Semantic/pragmatic approaches. The first major contribution toward the first approach is the widening + strengthening account by Kadmon & Landman (1993). These authors’ account consists of two steps. First, they propose that NPI indefinites, such as English any-terms, seman- tically differ from plain indefinites in that NPIs are domain wideners. Such domain-widening indefinites extend the domain of reference beyond the contextual restrictions that plain indefi- nites are subject to. Take sentences 54a and 54b, which contain Kadmon and Landman’s original examples:

(54a)

I don’t have potatoes

(54b)

I don’t have any potatoes

Whereas example 54a entails that in a particular domain the speaker doesn’t have potatoes, example 54b suggests that the speaker doesn’t have even a single old potato in some corner of the kitchen.