nasality and negation

[Martin Haspelmath]

Willi Mayerthaler discussed the alleged association between negation and 
nasality in his 1981 book "Morphologische Natürlichkeit", in §5.2 on 
phonetic iconism. He cites a forthcoming paper "Phonetisch ikonische 
Kodierung von Negationspartikeln", but apparently this paper never appeared.

In the half-page remarks in the 1981 book, he claims that negative 
markers never consist of only a vowel, and that it is striking how often 
the consonant is a nasal, also outside of Indo-European. He associates 
this with a culturally widespread tendency to signal denial by the 
interruption of sensory contacts.

Martin

Mayerthaler, Willi. 1981. Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: 
Athenaion. (= Mayerthaler 1988)
Mayerthaler, Willi. 1988. Naturalness in morphology. Ann Arbor: Karoma.


Östen Dahl wrote:
> Otto Jespersen claims in his "Negation in English and other languages"
> (1917) that there is a natural tendency for negative words to begin in n-.
> When I did research on the typology of negation around 1980 I tried to see
> if there were any such tendencies but the claim did not seem to be confirmed
> in my materials. I do not know if anyone has done any more systematic count
> since.
>
> Östen Dahl
>
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
>> On Behalf Of Kaoru Horie
>> Sent: den 30 augusti 2007 00:51
>> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>> Subject: Re: nasality and negation
>>
>> Dear Eduardo,
>>
>> I remember having read a similar statement, possibly in Talmy Givon's 1978
>> paper.
>> Horn's book may also provide some relevant information.
>>
>> Kaoru Horie
>> **************
>> *Talmy Givon. (1978) Negation in language: Pragmatics, function, ontology.
>> In Peter Cole,
>> editor, Syntax and Semantics, Volume 9 (Pragmatics), pages 69-112.
>> Academic
>> Press, New York.
>>
>> *Horn, L.R. (1989) A natural history of negation. University of Chicago
>> Press, Chicago.
>>
>> At 18:33 07/08/29 -0400, you wrote:
>>     
>>> Dear colleagues,
>>>
>>> I remember having read somewhere, quite a while ago, about a
>>> cross-linguistic tendency for negative morphemes to present similar forms
>>> (involving nasal phonemes) in unrelated languages.  I unfortunately am
>>> unable to recall where I read this, and I couldn't find any reference to
>>> this subject among my textbooks or class notes.
>>>
>>> Could anyone help refresh my memory?  Any bibliographical references
>>> would be very much appreciated.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>>
>>> Eduardo
>>>       
>
>
>   


-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

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