nasality and negation

[Matthew Dryer]

I think we need to be careful in a number of ways about what constitutes 
relevant evidence regarding the hypothesis of an association between 
negation and nasality.  First, anecdotal citations of examples of languages 
without nasals in negative morphemes are largely irrelevant.  Even lists of 
negative morphemes in hundreds of languages would tell us little (unless 
the association were so strong that most languages had nasals in negative 
morphemes, but that does not appear to be the case).  Such lists would tell 
us little for two reasons.  First, it could be the case that only a 
minority of languages have nasals in negative morphemes but that there is 
still a statistically significant association between nasality and 
negation, namely if nasals still occur significantly more often in negative 
morphemes than in other types of morphemes.  Second, unless one controls 
for genealogical and areal relationships, the appearance of an association 
or lack of an association might be an artifact of one's sample.  Solving 
those problems is not a trivial matter, as I have argued in various 
publications.  Larry Hyman's observation that there are a very large number 
of Niger-Congo languages without nasals in negative morphemes is quite 
beside the point.  To the contrary, what we need to do is to avoid 
examining too many languages from the same family precisely in order to 
factor out the distorting effects of large families.  Finally note that if 
we were to examine the hypothesis seriously, we would also have to control 
for length of morphemes.  It is quite possible, for example, that nasals 
occur in words meaning 'dog' significantly more often than in negative 
morphemes only because morphemes meaning 'dog' tend to be longer than 
negative morphemes.  The hypothesis deserves to be tested, but doing so 
would not be trivial, and would require collecting data on other sorts of 
morphemes as well in order to test whether negative morphemes have nasals 
more often than other morphemes.

Matthew Dryer