LINGUIST List 9.1836

Thu Dec 24 1998

Review: Forget et al. Negation and Polarity

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  • Shravan Vasishth, Forget et al. Negation and Polarity.

    Message 1: Forget et al. Negation and Polarity.

     Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 08:17:04 -0500 (EST)
    From: Shravan Vasishth <vasishthling.ohio-state.edu>
    Subject: Forget et al. Negation and Polarity.


    Danielle Forget, Paul Hirschbuehler, France Martineau and Maria-Luisa Rivero. (eds) Negation and Polarity. Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1997. Pp. 365, USD 83.00 / NLG 166.00. ISBN 90 272 3660 7 (Eur.)/1-55619-871-X (US) (alk. paper)

    Reviewed by Shravan Vasishth, The Ohio State University.

    This book is a collection of seventeen papers (selected from a total of twenty seven) presented at the conference, ``Negation: Syntax and Semantics'', held May 11-13, 1995, at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Two papers are in French, and the rest are in English. The papers are arranged alphabetically by author, and there are three very convenient indices towards the end of the book, of authors, terms and concepts, and languages and language families.

    The study of negation and polarity has gained importance in linguistics over the last several decades, perhaps because the issues raised by the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of negation and polarity directly affect linguistic theory as a whole. The present collection reflects the diverse and sophisticated approaches that have been brought to bear on this subject and is thus a valuable contribution to the field. In this review, for reasons of space, I will summarize and discuss articles by topic, focusing on some issues that have implications for linguistic theory in general. A major theme in this collection is negative concord (NC). The papers by Viviene Deprez, Liliane Haegeman, Daniel Valois, Paul Rowlett, Joao Peres, and Jacob Hoeksema all touch on various aspects of NC, and several take mutually conflicting positions on the subject. The syntax papers on NC presuppose some familiarity with GB syntax and in particular with Haegeman's Neg-criterion and the related Wh-criterion (see, e.g., Haegeman 1995 for details).

    Regarding the semantics of N-words (these are words such as English `no-one' and its French equivalent `personne'), Joao Peres (``Extending the notion of negative concord'') argues for a unified view of NPIs and N-words as indefinites as argued for by Ladusaw (1992). Jack Hoeksema (``Negation and negative concord in Middle Dutch'') shows that evidence from Middle Dutch points to N-words being ambiguous between a negative-existential and existential reading. Both analyses converge towards Dowty's (1994) treatment of N-words as being ambiguous between a negative meaning and an existential interpretation.

    Turning next to the several syntax papers on N-words, Viviene Deprez (``A non-unified analysis of negative concord'') presents data from French and Haitian Creole to show that Haegeman's Neg-criterion is redundant in accounting for NC, and that, following Ladusaw (1992), N-words are best treated as non-negative indefinite NPs. Liliane Haegeman (``The syntax of N-words and the Neg-criterion'') argues against Deprez's claim that N-words do not have the NEG feature. Haegeman's refutation of Deprez's arguments, although convincing, would have been even more persuasive if she had discussed Haitian Creole and French (the languages Deprez bases her arguments on) rather than limiting herself principally to West Flemish.

    Daniel Valois (``Neg-movement and Wh-movement'') explores another aspect of the Neg-criterion; he shows that in spite of the difference in behavior between N-words and Wh-traces, the Neg-criterion can account for N-words if one follows Haegeman (1995:234-269) in treating SpecNegP as both an A and A' position.

    Paul Rowlett (``Jesperson, Negative Concord, and A'-binding'') attempts to provide a purely syntactic account of NC and non-NC languages by adopting and modifying Haegeman's and Progovac's proposals. His main claim is that if one recasts the Spec-Head agreement requirement as a weaker Spec-Head compatibility requirement, NPI and negative quantifier licensing can be accounted for in terms of A'-binding. This paper, although very insightful in its treatment of data from European languages, faces the problem that the analysis would be hard to motivate cross-linguistically. For example, reliance on functional projections (FP) such as NegP becomes difficult when one considers languages like Japanese, Korean, and Hindi, where the presence of FPs in general is not well-motivated (see. e.g., Kim and Sag 1995, Sells 1995, Fukushima 1998). But even if one were to allow the functional projection NegP in Hindi (contra Mahajan 1988), according to Rowlett's analysis the Hindi negation marker would be predicted to appear in the Spec-NegP position since Hindi is a non-NC language. However, existing research (e.g., Dwivedi 1991, Vasishth 1997, and Bhandari 1998) has shown that if NegP were present in Hindi, the negation marker would have to be in Neg_o position, not Spec-NegP. Given the importance of cross-linguistic validity in GB syntax, this makes Rowlett's analysis somewhat harder to justify.

    If functional projections are indeed under-motivated in syntax, the two papers summarized below are also open to the same criticism. M. Teresa Espinal (``Non-negative negation and Wh-exclamatives'') presents a syntactic analysis of the licensing of non-negative or expletive negation in exclamative wh-sentences (such as `How many people did you not deceive in your youth!'). In order to account for various facts about exclamatives, Espinal posits a functional projection, Int(ensifier)P, above CP, to which the wh-element must raise at LF. A licensing condition, logical absorption (Espinal 1992), accounts for negation being expletive in exclamatives: briefly, an abstract intensifier operator which lexically selects negation absorbs Neg in the configuration

    [... Op [C [ ... Neg ...]]]

    if Minimality is respected and no logical operator intervenes between OP and Neg at LF.

    Aafke Hulk and Ans van Kemenade (``Negation as a reflex of clause structure'') look at negation in Old English (OE) and Old French (OF) and conclude that negation occupies a fixed position (Spec, NegP). They assume a clause structure as follows:

    C AgrS Neg T (AgrO) V

    Observing that a pronominal subject appears to the left of the OE negative `na' while a DP subject appears to its right, they propose a more articulated phrase structure where a functional projection (FP) dominates NegP, Spec-FP providing a landing site for the pronominal subject. Providing a separate position for pronouns allows us to treat these not as clitics, as previous analyses (Pintzuk 1993) have done, but as ``weak pronouns'' (Cardinaletti and Starke (1994)). This overcomes the problems with Pintzuk's analysis, which presupposes that Spec-IP is a possible topic position. A similar analysis is proposed for OF, based on the distribution of `ne' and `pas' with respect to the finite verb and the pronominal subject. As in OE, the verb moves to F of the new functional projection FP, this movement later being lost in both languages.

    The status of functional projections in syntax is addressed rather decisively in two papers. Abeille and Godard (``The syntax of French Negative Adverbs'') convincingly argue that adverbs (including negative adverbs like `pas') in French do not support verb movement and functional projections, contra Emonds (1978) and Pollock (1989). They propose that adverbs are either adjoined to VP or occur at the same level as a complement of the VP. This view is formally treated within the Head-driven phrase structure (HPSG) framework (Pollard and Sag 1994). Denis Bouchard (``The syntax of sentential negation in French and English'') also argues that functional projections are undermotivated; however, he relies on his own version of Chomsky's Minimalist program (1995) to account for the facts. Bouchard argues that the recent checking based model (Chomsky 1995) has an element of redundancy since functional properties appear both as heads in the syntactic structure and as parts of a lexical item. He proposes an alternative `minimal' account where functional projections are unnecessary. Briefly, he assumes that (i) inflectional verbs are composite lexical items, with no additional functional categories, (ii) tense is in the highest projection of the sentence, (iii) the sentential negation marker must scope over as much of the sentence as possible, but not over tense. Bouchard's proposal is very attractive, but it would have been helpful (at least to this reviewer) if he had specified what a parameter is in the theory. In the Minimalist Program, a parameter is apparently ``a choice of STRONG/WEAK feature on a functional head'' (Fodor 1998:3). In the above account, we have a parametric choice on the accessing of composite heads: French allows the relevant parts of a composite V to be accessed part by part, but English never allows part by part access. This notion of parametrization may turn out to be problematic in Bouchard's theory.

    The articles discussed next are somewhat specialized; they deal with aspects of negation that presuppose some familiarity with the relevant literature.

    One paper, on the semantics and pragmatics of `only' by Laurence Horn (``Negative polarity and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference'') is an earlier version of his arguments concerning `only' in (Horn 1996). In the present paper, the principal question addressed is: what are the relationships between a sentence like (1)a and (1b),(1c)? (Note: the utterance (1a) has nothing to do with the line appearing in the well-known poem by Joyce Kilmer; the sentence here has its usual compositional meaning/use).

    (1)a. Only God can make a tree. b. God can make a tree. c. No one distinct from God can make a tree.

    While it is clear that (1a) entails (1c), the relationship between (1a) and its ``prejacent'' (1b) is more controversial. Is this relation one of entailment, semantic presupposition, pragmatic presupposition, or possibly conversational implicature? He concludes that (1b) is neither entailed, nor presupposed, but merely the ``...existential import of the corresponding universal...'' of (1a): ``...if no mortal can make a tree and the set of tree-makers is non-null, then the truth of the prejacent follows. No specific rule--entailment, presupposition, or implicature--need be invoked to derive [(1b)] from [(1a)]'' (p. 168). In addition, Horn also presents several arguments favoring the view that `only' is downward monotone, which is consistent with its NPI-licensing property. In this connection, and for the latest on a long-standing dispute between Horn, Jay Atlas, and others, about the (non-)downward monotone nature of `only' and its status as an NPI licensor, also see Atlas (1997).

    Eugene Rohrbaugh explores the relationship between focus and NPI licensing (``The role of focus in the licensing and interpretation of negative polarity items''). He provides impressive arguments against the well-known treatment by Kadmon and Landman (1993) of polarity sensitive (PS) and free-choice (FC) `any'. Rohrbaugh claims that it is the focus or intonational contour on `any' that is responsible for the widening effect discussed by Kadmon and Landman. He claims that a crucial difference between the two kinds of `any' (FC and PS) is that focus plays a role in the licensing FC `any' but not PS `any'. Interestingly, this analysis would predict correctly that in Hindi NPI `any', `koi-(bhii)', the focus particle `bhii' is optional, while in its homophonous PPI counterpart it is obligatory (Bhatia 1995:27), and that minimizers in Hindi obligatorily require focus particles in order to get the NPI interpretation (Vasishth 1998c). It would have been helpful, though, if Rohrbaugh had spelled out his analysis in detail rather than simply stating that focus plays a crucial role in NPI licensing.

    Michael Isreal explores a central issue relating to NPI licensing (``Scalar model of polarity sensitivity and aspectual operators''): why do NPIs exist at all? He summarizes his theory of polarity licensing as follows: ``Polarity in general is a matter of scalar inferencing and polarity items are just scalar operators: the proper expression of their lexical semantics depends on the availability of a properly constructed scalar model'' (p. 217). In this article, he assumes two scales, a q(uantificational) scale and an i(nformational) scale. Propositions can be high or low on the q- and i-scale. The q-scale value refers to the proposition's position on the scale; a q-value of a proposition is high when the asserted or text proposition (TP) is located higher on a contextually determined scale compared to some alternative context proposition (CP), and low if the TP is lower. The i-scale value refers to its (relative) informativeness, where informativeness is defined as follows: if the TP entails the CP, the i-value is high, and low if the CP entails the TP.

    An example of how this works is the minimizer `a wink' (minimizers are expressions which, if they appear in a positive context, denote a minimal quantity, and in negative contexts denote ``the absence of a minimal quantity, and hence the presence of no quantity at all'' (Horn 1989:400)).

    (2)a. Marianne didn't sleep a wink that night. b.*Marianne slept a wink that night.

    As an Emphatic NPI (see classification given below), this minimizer has a low q-value and a high i-value when it is felicitous; a low q-value because it indicates a minimal quantity, and a high i-value because the TP `M didn't sleep the smallest amount' entails the CP `M didn't sleep a normal amount.' (2b) is ungrammatical because the CP, `M slept a normal amount', entails the TP, `M slept the smallest amount', resulting in a low i-value.

    Israel posits four types of polarity items, Emph(atic) and Understat(ed) NPIs and PPIs (an example of the first is given above):

    Emph NPIs Understat NPIs Emph PPIs Understat PPIs

    q-scale low high high low i-scale high low high low This analysis is applied to apparently non-quantificational aspectual operators, such as `yet', `already', `still', and `anymore', which are also treated as scalar operators.

    For a more fully worked out version of Israel's research, the reader should consult (Israel 1996). Although Israel's treatment is extremely insightful, its cross-linguistic validity would be enhanced further once it is extended to account for NPIs in languages like Hindi and Japanese, where `focus particles' crucially affect the behavior of NPIs (see Vasishth 1998a and 1998b).

    Elizabeth Pearce (``Negation and indefinites in Maori'') addresses the problem of NPI licensing in Maori, a VSO language. She follows Progovac's (1994) binding approach to account for the salient facts. The reader may find it useful to consult Horn and Lee's (1995) critique of Progovac's theory in this regard.

    Jacques Moeschler (``La negation comme expression procedurale'') addresses a central problem relating to metalinguistic negation (MN): is MN part of a pragmatic account that recognizes truth-conditionality (Horn 1989) or is truth-conditionality to be excluded (Ducrot 1972)? Moeschler develops Carston's (1996) analysis of MN, which is itself based on Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). He proposes a contextually driven approach to MN: negation provides instructions for building a context necessary for interpreting utterances, and external and metalinguistic negation give rise to different contexts. This is implemented as an algorithmic procedure that allows us to give a uniform account of the various kinds of MN, as presented below.

    1. If there is a proposition P' such that (not(P), P') corresponds to the formal structure of the phrase, 1.1 If (P --> not(P')), then conclude not(P) --> P'; 1.1.1 If (P' --> not(P)) then you have ``negation abaissante'' 1.1.2 If (P' --> P) then you have ``negation majorante'' 1.2 If (E(P) --> not(E(P'))), conclude (not(E(P)) --> E(P')), (echoic negation) 1.3 If (not(P) --> Q) (P --> Q) and (P' --> not(Q)), conclude (not(P) --> not(Q)) (presuppositional negation) else go to 2. 2. Find an available proposition Q: 2.1 If Q is available in the `cotext': 2.1.1 If (Q --> P) and not(P), conclude (P and not(P)) and nullify not(P) (concessive negation, polemic) 2.1.2 If (Q --> P) and not(P) then conclude not(Q) and nullify Q (refutative negation, polemic) 2.2 If Q is available in the `co-text': 2.2.1 From (P --> Q) and not(P), conclude not(Q) (inferential negation, descriptive)

    An example of how this works is the case of the `more-than' reading of negation (his term is ``negation majorante''). Consider the following instance of ``negation majorante'', which is a kind of MN (in this connection, see also Horn 1989:204):

    Max is not tall, he is gigantic. By (1), we have P=Max is tall and P'=Max is gigantic. By (1.1), since (P --> not(P')), by invited inference, we can conclude (Not(P) --> P'). By (1.1.1), since P' --> P, this is ``negation majorante''. Horn points out (personal communication) that the Relevance-theoretic position that Moeschler follows Carston (1996) in supporting, is in fact quite close to Horn's. Carston's forthcoming paper (1999) also apparently makes this point.

    To conclude, we have not been able to look closely at each article in this collection (indeed, I have not discussed some articles here), but, clearly, many of these articles address important issues of general linguistic interest, and several shed new light on various aspects of negation and polarity. This volume should thus prove to be an important source of reference for linguists.

    REFERENCES

    Note: The references given below are also available in BibTeX format from the following ftp site: ling.ohio-state.edu/pub/Students/Vasishth/Reviews/neg_pol.bib

    Atlas, Jay David, 1996. `Only' Noun Phrases, Pseudo-Negative Generalized Quantifiers, Negative Polarity Items, and Monotonicity. Journal of Semantics, Vol. 13, pp. 265--329.

    Bhandari, Rita, 1998. On the role of tense for negative polarity item licensing, Paper presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York City.

    Bhatia, Tej K., 1995. Negation in South Asian Languages. Indian Institute of Language Studies, Patiala, India.

    Carston, Robyn, 1996. Metalinguistic Negation and Echoic Use. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 25, pp. 309--330.

    Carston, Robyn, (to appear). Negation, `Presupposition', and Metarepresentation: A Response to Noel Burton-Roberts. Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 35, pp. ??--??

    Chomsky, Noam, 1995. The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Dowty, David, 1994. The role of Negative Polarity and Concord Marking in Natural Language Reasoning. MS, Ohio State University.

    Ducrot, Oswald, 1972. Dire et ne pas dire. Hermann, Paris.

    Dwivedi, Veena. 1991. Negation as a functional projection in Hindi. WECOL 4 Proceedings, edited by K. Hunt, T. Perry, and V. Samiian, pp. 88--100.

    Emonds, Joseph E., 1978. The Verbal Complex V'-V in French. Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 9, pp. 151--175.

    Fodor, Janet Jean, 1998. What is a Parameter? Annual Meeting of the LSA, New York City.

    Fukushima, Kazuhiko, 1998. Compositional, Inherent and Frozen Negation: Lexicalism versus Functional Categories. The Proceedings of the Salford Conference on Negation.

    Haegeman, Liliane, 1995. The Syntax of Negation. CUP, Cambridge, UK.

    Horn, Laurence R., 1989. A Natural History of Negation. UCP, Chicago.

    Horn, Laurence R. and Young-Suk Lee, 1995. Progovac on Polarity. Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 31, pp. 401--424.

    Horn, Laurence R., 1996. Exclusive Company: Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference. Journal of Semantics, Vol. 13, pp. 1--40.

    Israel, Michael, 1996. Polarity Sensitivity as Lexical Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 19, pp. 619--666.

    Kadmon, Nirit and Fred Landman, 1993. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 16. pp. 353--422.

    Kim, Jongbok and Ivan A. Sag, 1995. English and French Negation: A Lexicalist Perspective, MS, Stanford, CA.

    Ladusaw, William A., 1992. Expressing Negation. SALT II Proceedings, edited by Chris Barker and David Dowty. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics No. 40.

    Mahajan, Anoop Kumar. 1988. Word Order and Negation in Hindi. MS, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

    Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag, 1994. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, UCP, Chicago.

    Pollock, Jean-Yves, 1989. Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 20, pp. 365--424.

    Progovac, Ljiljana, 1994. Negative and Positive Polarity, CUP, Cambridge, UK.

    Sells, Peter. 1995. Korean and Japanese Morphology from a Lexical Perspective. Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 26, pp. 277--325.

    Vasishth, Shravan, 1997. The NEG-Criterion and Negative Polarity Licensing in Hindi and English. Osaka University Journal of Language and Culture, Vol 6, pp. 159--176. Available by ftp: ling.ohio-state.edu/pub/Students/Vasishth/Published

    Vasishth, Shravan, 1998a. Boolean properties of focus particles and NPIs in Japanese. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York City. Available by ftp: ling.ohio-state.edu/pub/Students/Vasishth/Work_In_Progress

    Vasishth, Shravan, 1998b. Monotonicity constraints on negative polarity in Hindi. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 51, Ohio State University, edited by Mary Bradshaw, Dave Odden, and Derek Wyckoff, pp. 147-166. Available by ftp: ling.ohio-state.edu/pub/Students/Vasishth/Published

    Vasishth, Shravan, 1998c. Focus Particles and Negative Polarity in Hindi, The Proceedings of the Salford Conference on Negation.

    Short biography of the reviewer:

    Shravan Vasishth a (2nd year) graduate student in the Linguistics department of the Ohio State University. His research interests include the formal syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of word order, which subsumes issues relating to negation and polarity.