Negation and Functional Projections in Early Grammar

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QUESTIONS WITH FLOATED QUANTIFIERS

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Editorial : What Are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How Do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation?

International audienc

How speakers interpret the negative markers no and no … pas in Catalan

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation designed to test the interpretation of the optional doubling of the negative markers no and pas in Expletive Negation (EN) contexts and in preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts in Catalan. We show that in EN contexts a negative interpretation of no is preferred to anexpletive one, with non-negative readings being less widespread than expected from what is described in traditional grammars. In NCI contexts the overt presence of no basically contributes to a single negation interpretation, thus confirming the status of Catalan as aNegative Concord language. We also show that, in the absence of discourse environments, pas in both EN and NCI contexts shows a variable interpretation, a characteristic of negative polarity items. Our results indicate that pas does not increase the amount of negative interpretation of no in EN contexts, or of Double Negation in NCI contexts, but is an item dependent on the interpretation of no. We conclude that the strengthening role of Catalan pas (at stage two of Jespersen's cycle), while associated with the expression of metalinguistic negation, does not reverse the truth or falsity of a proposition

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 semantic one (e.g., the ‘I ate nothing’ reading of “I didn’t eat nothing”), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. ‘It is not the case that I ate nothing’). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports micro-parametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation

Action relevance in linguistic context drives word-induced motor activity

Many neurocognitive studies on the role of motor structures in action-language processing have implicitly adopted a “dictionary-like” framework within which lexical meaning is constructed on the basis of an invariant set of semantic features. The debate has thus been centered on the question of whether motor activation is an integral part of the lexical semantics (embodied theories) or the result of a post-lexical construction of a situation model (disembodied theories). However, research in psycholinguistics show that lexical semantic processing and context-dependent meaning construction are narrowly integrated. An understanding of the role of motor structures in action-language processing might thus be better achieved by focusing on the linguistic contexts under which such structures are recruited. Here, we therefore analyzed online modulations of grip force while subjects listened to target words embedded in different linguistic contexts. When the target word was a hand action verb and when the sentence focused on that action (John signs the contract) an early increase of grip force was observed. No comparable increase was detected when the same word occurred in a context that shifted the focus toward the agent's mental state (John wants to sign the contract). There mere presence of an action word is thus not sufficient to trigger motor activation. Moreover, when the linguistic context set up a strong expectation for a hand action, a grip force increase was observed even when the tested word was a pseudo-verb. The presence of a known action word is thus not required to trigger motor activation. Importantly, however, the same linguistic contexts that sufficed to trigger motor activation with pseudo-verbs failed to trigger motor activation when the target words were verbs with no motor action reference. Context is thus not by itself sufficient to supersede an “incompatible” word meaning. We argue that motor structure activation is part of a dynamic process that integrates the lexical meaning potential of a term and the context in the online construction of a situation model, which is a crucial process for fluent and efficient online language comprehension

Grip Force Reveals the Context Sensitivity of Language-Induced Motor Activity during “Action Words

Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on \ud time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically\ud governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa

On the conceptual role of number: 35th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages

International audienc

Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord

In this paper, two core perspectives on variation in negative concord are distinguished, one that focuses on the syntactic nature of negation as the central factor of variation, and one that focuses on the internal make-up of the negative dependent terms, the n-words. The first part of the paper out-lines the di¤erent predictions that emerge from these di¤ering perspectives. The second part provides evidence in support of the latter perspective