32.1311, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Déprez, Espinal (2020)

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Subject: 32.1311, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Déprez, Espinal (2020)

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Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2021 14:15:27
From: Peter Backhaus [backhaup at gmail.com]
Subject: The Oxford Handbook of Negation

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36644437


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1748.html

EDITOR: Viviane  Déprez
EDITOR: M. Teresa Espinal
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Negation
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Peter Backhaus, Waseda University

SUMMARY

The Oxford Handbook of Negation, edited by Viviane Déprez and M. Teresa
Espinal, is an impressive 896-pages piece of work divided into seven main
sections. Like all handbooks in the OUP series, it comes with an introduction
by the editors, an extensive list of abbreviations, a list of contributors, as
well as a summarized list of references at the end of the book. 

The first section is about the “Fundamentals” of negation. It starts with
Laurence R. Horn’s introduction to the basics, such as Aristotle’s laws of
non-contradiction and the excluded middle, the distinction between contrary
and contradictory negation and their respective locations in the Square of
Opposition, and the common trend for contradiction to acquire contrary meaning
(where “not happy” normally means “unhappy”). In the next chapter, Jacques
Moeschler examines negative predicates such as “unmarried” and their
differences with morphosyntactic negation (“not married”). In Chapter 4, David
Ripley studies the relationship between denial and negation. Karen De Clercq
gives a concise overview of the different types of negation, taking at its
center Klima’s (1964) distinction between sentence (wide-scope) and
constituent (narrow-scope) negation, plus his classic diagnostic tests. She
also discusses her own classification of negative markers and speculates on
the existence of an additional layer of “pure” external negation, as recently
attested for Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Bar-Asher Siegal 2015). Section I
closes with Shrikant Joshi’s account of the various types of affixal negation
and how to classify them, including his own categorization of direct vs.
indirect negation. 

Section II deals with the syntactic aspects of negation. Johan van der Auwera
and Olga Krasnoukhova use a (“convenient” but fairly solid) data sample to
present an overview of syntactic types of negation and their distribution,
typological and areal, across the world’s languages. In the next chapter,
Chiara Gianollo discusses the various syntactic realizations that negation
markers may take (as affixes, particles, auxiliaries, etc.). Possible
syntactic slots for negation markers are explored by Cecilia Poletto, who
presents exhibits from various Italian dialects. In Chapter 10, Elizabeth
Pearce examines the effect of negation on word order, such as a common
reshuffle of VSO languages into SVO when a negative marker is inserted. The
section concludes with Josep Quer’s introduction to how sign languages across
the globe express negation, by manual and non-manual markers. He identifies
both points in common with spoken languages (e.g. negative concord), and some
“modality-particular ingredients” (195) where signing clearly has a modal edge
over speaking.

Section III moves on to the syntax-semantics interface. It opens with another
contribution by Horn, who gives an overview of the phenomenon of neg-raising
(NR), as in “I don’t think you’re right” (wide-scope, contradictory) in the
sense of “I think you’re wrong” (narrow, contrary). In Chapter 13, Clemens May
discusses how negation causes intervention effects that disallow certain
interrogative forms, with focus on negative islands and so-called Beck
effects. Chapter 14, by Maribel Romero, interrogates three major types of
negative interrogatives, followed by Denis Delfitto’s account of
grammaticalized wishful not-thinking, as in French “Je crains qu’il ne vienne”
(lit., “I’m afraid that he (not) comes”). Section III closes with Nicholas
Fleisher’s examination of the complex scopal entanglements of negation and
quantifiers. Acknowledging that pragmatic factors constitute a driving force
behind the phenomenon, this provides a perfect transition to the next section,
which deals with the semantics and pragmatics of negation.

Naomi Francis and Sabine Iatridou kick off Section IV with a discussion on how
modals scope with (and without) negation. Barry Schein offers a spectacular
view on negation through the cabin window of event semantics. Focus is the
focus of Chapter 19, in which Anamaria Fălăuş investigates the intricate
relationship between negation and focus constituents such as “even” and
“only,” and their eccentric negative kin. In Chapter 20, Ana Maria Martins
discusses the concept of metalinguistic negation as it was first named by
Ducrot (1972), and more rigidly defined in Horn’s 1989 classic. Allowing some
overlay with the previous chapter, David Beaver and Kristin Denlinger explore
what negation does with presuppositions, and how it keeps some intact while
others are cancelled (e.g. “Danny didn’t stop smoking” normally doesn’t deny
the presupposition that Danny smoked previously, but can also do just that, as
in “Danny didn’t stop smoking because he never smoked in the first place”). 

Section V is dedicated to the topic of negative dependencies. It starts with
Lucia M. Tovena’s succinct discussion of one of the core items in negation
research, negative polarity items (NPIs). Next, Susagna Tubau explores the
work of minimizers and maximizers as (positive or negative) polarity items and
their differing degrees of “strength.” Hedde Zeijlstra examines negative
quantifiers and the “nall” problem, i.e., why negative universals such as “not
all” so stubbornly refuse to lexicalize. In Chapter 25, Andrew Weir explores
(syntactically) incomplete answers (“To Paris,” “Nothing”) and what they tell
us about specific aspects of negation. Next, Anastasia Giannakidou discusses
the common phenomenon of two (or more) negative components producing a single
interpretation of negation, also known as negative concord. This is closely
related, obviously, to the topic of double negation, which Henriëtte de Swart
explores in Chapter 27. Using data from two larger multilingual corpora, she
compares double negation languages (English, German, Dutch) with languages
that regularly exhibit negative concord (Italian, Spanish), thereby uncovering
some typologically rather unexpected findings. Her approach suggests that
data-driven methods can make an important contribution to the theory of
negation.

Section VI is about variation in negation. Phillip Wallage gives a diachronic
account of what Tottie (1991) first called “no/not negation” in English (“I
saw nothing” vs. “I didn’t see anything”). In Chapter 29, Christina Tortora
and Frances Blanchette study negation in non-standard varieties, with examples
from English, West Flemish and Romance varieties that show some noteworthy
differences with negation in their respective standard varieties. Negative
cycles, best-known the one first described by Jespersen (1917), are the topic
of Anne Breitbarth’s chapter, followed by Gianollo’s second contribution, on
the evolution of negative dependencies. In the last chapter of the section, on
the role of pragmatics in negative change, Pierre Larrivée adds some meat to
the intuitive but fuzzy idea that new negation markers tend to emerge from
material originally used for intensifying effects.

Section VII, about the emergence and acquisition of negation, starts with
Manuel Bohn, Josep Call, and Christoph J. Völter’s discussion about to what
extent non-human animals (big apes, parrots, etc.) are capable of negative
reasoning. Making a basic distinction between proto-negation (based on
mutually exclusive extensions) and negation proper (i.e., of propositions),
the authors show that while there is as yet “no compelling evidence for
negation proper in nonhuman animals” (588), some recent studies point to the
possibility of negative reasoning beyond proto-negation. We return to our own
species in Chapter 34, in which Jean-Rémy Hochmann explores pre-lexical
nay-say in human infants, whose development of truth-functional negation
evolves through previous stages of expressing denial and unfulfilled
expectations. L1 acquisition of negation is also the topic of Rosalind
Thornton’s contribution, which studies at what age successively complex forms
of negation such as negative questions, double negation, and NPIs become
mastered. Finally, Liliana Sánchez and Jennifer Austin deal with the
acquisition of negation in second language learning, and likely differences
(or not) depending on one’s L1.

The final section is labelled “Experimental Investigations of Negation.”
Barbara Kaup and Carolin Dudschig discuss the major research questions in
processing negation and the differences with processing non-negated
constructions, a problem that will keep popping up in the subsequent chapters.
Hanna Muller and Colin Phillips review the literature on negative polarity
illusions, i.e., NPIs that only appear to be licensed, by “luring” negative
material in the syntactic periphery. In Chapter 39, Pilar Prieto and M. Teresa
Espinal highlight the importance of prosody and gesture in expressing
negation, arguing that both complements are indispensable for a proper
understanding of negation as a whole. Yosef Grodzinsky and his collaborators
review seminal and more recent psycholinguistic studies that localize negation
outside the brain’s language areas. Veena D. Dwivedi draws attention to some
systematic individual differences in the processing of negative constructions.
She advocates a “semantics before syntax model” to better account for these
differences. Chapter 42, by Ken Ramshøj Christensen, explores how negation is
neurologically processed. The “somewhat consistent picture” (738) that emerges
from previous research suggests that negation is more difficult to handle than
positive structures. In the final chapter, Liuba Papeo and Manuel de Vega
partially argue against this view, presenting results from recent
neurolinguistic research that suggests negative meanings seep in just as
swiftly as their affirmative counterparts.

EVALUATION

The Oxford Handbook of Negation brings together a most competent team of
authors, with a list of contributors that reads like a who is who in negation
research. The articles have been rigorously peer reviewed, as acknowledged in
footnotes and comments. Most contributions provide a comprehensive and
balanced overview of their respective topic, without pushing a certain view or
overemphasizing the author’s own research. 

Some thematic overlap between articles is perhaps unavoidable, and allows each
contribution to stand on its own. Particularly for a handbook, this is
certainly a plus since it means that you won’t have to read the whole piece
from cover to cover. Unless you are a reviewer, in which case you might at
times wonder why crucial topics such as negative polarity items and negative
concord are fully dealt with only at a relatively late point in the book. On
the other hand, there is certainly no perfect logical order to a plot as
deceitful and twisted as that of negation. 

The writing of most articles is clear and often entertaining, as when van der
Auwera and Krashnoukova observe, almost Mel Brooks-like, that “The similarity
between privatives and negative existentials is obvious: when a state of
affairs is without something then this something does not exist in the state
of affairs” (109). Or, applying the Klima test to their own prose, “Another
problem is that to propose that there would be a natural tendency for an early
placement of the negator Jespersen had few data, and neither had Horn” (104).
Speaking of the latter, Horn has been careful to update his renowned example
sentences, as in “Nobody but Trump, I don’t suppose, would have said that”
(15). In this respect, too, the Handbook of Negation is fully up to date (as
of fall 2020).

Though mentioned in several chapters, I had the impression that a bit more
attention could have been paid to negation in discourse. This aspect was
dearly missed, for instance, in the chapter on negative questions, where the
conversational context seems to matter so much, and where constructed examples
fail to properly do the job. Where the discursive aspect was mentioned, that
was mainly done passim (e.g. Chapter 39), or only to be eventually refuted in
favor of syntactic parameters (Chapter 36). Other relevant topics I would have
loved to see covered are negation in works of literature (e.g. Hidalgo-Downing
2003, Nørgaard 2007), or the visual mapping of negation as commonly done in
prohibitions, warning signs, and other types of “don’t” illustrations (e.g.
Johnson 2006, Stones et al. 2013).

The Handbook of Negation has been edited with great care, and there are only a
few minor typos. The list of abbreviations at the beginning will certainly be
welcomed by readers with different backgrounds, though a few important symbols
(e.g. # for pragmatic anomality) are missing. In addition, there were
sometimes problems with examples from languages other than English. For
instance, there seems to be something amiss with the Vietnamese excerpts
presented under (40) in Chapter 7, and some of the French and Italian examples
in Chapter 9 come without an English translation.

It is not the case though, that these minor points would weaken the overall
weight and value of the work under review. To everyone who ever wanted
assembled the fascinating whims of no, not, non-, and never between two
covers, I gladly recommend: Say yes to this book.

REFERENCES

Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur. 2015. The case for external sentential negation:
Evidence from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Linguistics 53(3). 1031-78.

Ducrot, Oswald. 1972. Dire et ne pas dire: Principes de sémantique
linguistique. Paris: Hermann.

Hidalgo-Downing, Laura. 2003. Negation as a stylistic feature in Joseph
Heller's Catch-22: A corpus study. Style 37(3). 318-340.

Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen:
A.F. Høst & Søn.

Johnson, Daniel A. 2006. Practical aspects of graphics related to safety
instructions and warnings. Michael S. Wogalter (ed.), Handbook of warnings,
463-476. Mahwah: Erlbaum.

Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold Katz
(eds.), The Structure of Language, 246-323. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Nørgaard, Nina. 2007. Disordered collarettes and uncovered tables: Negative
polarity as a stylistic device in Joyce’s “Two Gallants”. Journal of Literary
Semantics, 36(1). 35-52.

Stones, Catherine, Peter Knapp & Laura Malmgren. 2013. The interpretation of
triangular borders to indicate warning in medicines pictograms and the
potential influence of being a driver. Information Design Journal
20(2).161-170.

Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Negation in English speech and writing: A study in
variation. San Diego: Academic Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Peter Backhaus is Professor at the Department of English Language and
Literature at Waseda University, Tokyo. His main research interests are in
pragmatics and stylistics.





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