Chapter 3
Negative Concord and sentential negation in Gallo
The goal of this paper is to get a better
understanding of Negative Concord (NC) in natural language through
the study of Gallo, a Romance language spoken in Brittany. Despite
obvious similarities with respect to Standard French (SF), Gallo
differs from it by integrating sentential negation
pâ/pouin ‘not’ to the NC system. We will first
show that previous analyses of the phenomenon based on specific
properties of n-words (see Déprez (2003, 2016), Zeijlstra (2004, 2010)) fail to account for the difference between Gallo
and SF. Then we will argue for an alternative approach (inspired by
Muller (2010) and
Homer (2013)) based
on properties of sentential negation itself. Finally, we will
propose how to account for inter/intra-individual microvariation of
NC in Gallo.
Keywords: Negative Concord, Romance languages, semi-negations/n-words, Microsyntactic variation, non-veridicality, anti-veridicality, Expletive Negation, Negation, Double Negation, French, Gallo, Creole
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.From Standard French to Gallo
- 2.1Negative Concord (NC) and Double Negation (DN) in Standard French (SF)
- 2.2Negative Concord (NC) and Double Negation (DN) in Gallo
- 3.Evaluation of previous analyses of NC/DN readings
- 3.1Déprez (2003,
2016): n-words as NPIs
- 3.2Zeijlstra’s (2004,
2010) syntactic
approach
- 3.3Déprez (1999) and
De Swart & Sag
(2002): Resumptive quantification
- 4.Our approach to NC: On the status of sentential neg.
- 4.1Building on Muller (1991, 2010)
- 4.2
Pâ/pouin as a semi-negation in Gallo
- 4.3Implementation through Zeijlstra (2004)?
- 5.Microvariation in Gallo
- 5.1Gallo as a non-strict NC language
- 5.2Intra-/Inter-individual variation
- 5.3How to analyze microvariation: Some available options
- 6.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Sources of Gallo data
-
Bibliography
References
Sources of Gallo data
GG:
Deriano, P. (
2005)
Grammaire
du gallo, Label LN,
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PG:
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IR:
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Lecuyer
(
2014) :
Ene
oraïje naïr, 1st on-line novel in
Gallo.
SyMiLa:
data
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