The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: evidence from 'any'

This article brings together an experimental study involving L2 knowledge of negation in English and an analysis of how English language textbooks treat negation, in order to consider whether textbook explanations of negation could better exploit linguistic insights into negation. We focus on the English negative polarity item any, whose distribution is contingent on negation, whether through the explicit negator not or through lexical semantic negators (e.g. hardly). Our experiment compares Chinese-speaking learners with existing data from Arabic-speaking learners, finding lower accuracy on any with lexical semantic negators in both groups. Our textbook analysis reveals an approach to negation that is limited to form, focusing on the explicit negator not without explicit treatment of other types of negation. We propose that emphasizing the meaning of negation, with explicit treatment of the full range of negative forms could facilitate more complete acquisition across a range of grammatical properties where negation plays a role

What makes choice natural

The idea to use choice functions in the semantic analysis of indefinites has recently gained increasing attention among linguists and logicians. A central linguistic motivation for the revived interest in this logical perspective, which can be traced back to the epsilon calculus of Hilbert & Bernays (1939), is the observation by Reinhart (1992

Three Types Of Polarity

There can be no doubt that the phenomenon of polarity, though usually the subject of syntactic and semantic study, is essentially of a purely lexical nature.' This is evident to anyone who is familiar with the distribution of so-called negative polarity items. The fact that expressions such as hoeven and ook maar iets in Dutch, brauchen and auch nur irgendetwas in German, or the English cognates need and anything (at all) require the presence of a negative element somewhere in the sentence, is a property which is intrinsic to the items in question and must therefore be accounted for in the lexicon. If there is any doubt as to the lexical nature of this phenomenon, it is completely eradicated by the distinction between negative polarity items of the weak and those of the strong type. In order to get a clear view of the content of this distinction, one does well to take the following Dutch examples into consideration.