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Negation and Negative Concord: The view from Creoles
Edited by Viviane Déprez and Fabiola Henri
[Contact Language Library 55] 2018
► pp. 69–100

A lexicalist account of negation and negative concord in Mauritian

This paper provides a descriptive and theoretical account of negation and negative concord in Mauritian within a constraint-based framework. It is argued that sentential negation is canonically preverbal but appears postverbally with neg-raising verbs, and that only the former participates in negative concord. Mauritian is moreover identified as a strict concord language notwithstanding the particular behavior of the NCI zame, which can appear without pa in preverbal positions. The idiosyncrasies of both NCIs and sentential negation in Mauritian are formalized by exploiting a lexicalist account within the SBCG framework.

Keywords: polyadic quantification, microvariation, clitics, pre- and postverbal negation, constraint-based grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Propositional negation in Mauritian
    • 2.1Clitic properties of Mauritian negation
    • 2.2 Pa and nepli as a negative quantifiers
    • 2.3Jespersen’s cycle?
  • 3.NCIs in Mauritian
    • 3.1Negative concord in Mauritian
    • 3.2Double negation
    • 3.3NCIs as negative quantifiers
  • 4.A polyadic approach to Mauritian negative concord within HPSG
    • 4.1The syntax of propositional negation
    • 4.2Negative concord
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.55.04hen
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