Double negation readings

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Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the linguistic environments in which double negation readings do and do not arise in double negation and negative concord languages. The theoretical background comes from other chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Negation. We briefly survey the experimental literature on the role of prosody in the comprehension of negative concord and double negation, and continue with a multilingual corpus investigation that focuses on language use. Under the assumption that all languages convey the same message in a specific context, production data in parallel corpora enable us to detect grammatical variation through translation. The examples are extracted from the parallel corpus Europarl and the languages discussed are English, Dutch, German, Italian, French and Spanish. Even though the set of languages is relatively small, the spread of grammars should be wide enough to shed light on the phenomenon of double negation in natural language.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Oxford Handbook of Negation
EditorsViviane Déprez, M. Teresa Espinal
Place of PublicationOxford, UK
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter27
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9780198830528
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Publication series

NameOxford Handbooks in Linguistics
PublisherOxford University Press

Keywords

  • double negation
  • negative concord
  • cross-linguistic variation
  • parallel corpus

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