Description

This book presents a novel overarching account of negation and negative dependencies, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition, and language change. Negation is a universal property of natural language, but languages can significantly differ in how they express it: there is variation in the form and position of negative elements, the number of manifestations of negative morphemes, and in the restrictions on the use of Negative and Positive Polarity Items. In this volume, Hedde Zeijlstra explores the hypothesis that all known syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical ways of encoding dependencies should be also be attested in the domain of negation, unless they are independently ruled out. He shows that the pluriform landscape of negative dependencies and markers of negation that emerges has broader implications for theories of syntax and semantics and their interface.