message transmitted on behalf of Didier Bottioneau

Sat Sep 1 15:09:29 UTC 2007

(same message as previously, with the"object" this time)

Dear all,

Investigating into some possible connection between negation and nasality is an exciting prospect but I wish to be sure I fully understand the question and its limits. In a few words:

1)     supposing that at some semantic, cognitive level or whatever there is any such thing like "negation", does it universally call for nasal marking? 
NO. Counter-examples are no doubt infinitely more abundant than matches.

2)     supposing that in a given language N can be analyzed as a "unified morpheme" with a core value, is it necessarily a negative one? 
NO. In Basque -n is used for forming the inessive and the genitive of NPs and the past and the 2nd person singular feminine in the agglutinative conjugation; and the negative marker is "ez". So one might wonder if the uses of -n are interconnected but certainly not how they relate with negation, unless I'm missing something.

3)     supposing that in a given language we find nasal markers connected with negation such as not in English, nu in Georgian, na(i) in Japanese (+ arimasen) and nngit in inuktitut, it seems necessary to determine whether the nasal element is a candidate in the first place. It is so in IE languages both because in synchrony the marker is sufficiently widespread to be undeniably attested (on distributional grounds) and because diachrony the same group has been stubbornly consistent in preserving the "nasal connection" of negativity in spite of phonological change - so that diachrony justifies the origin (this is perfectly tautological) but does not explain why the connection is still alive and kicking (the linguist). In other cases whether nasality is a candidate at all as a negative marker is to be explored. In Georgian is nu an isolated case: other occurrences of negative N? If not I am reluctant to admit it as a match. The case of nngit is to be investigated. That of na(i) and arimasen are more promising but not conclusive at this early stage.

4)     Admitting that nasality may be connected with negation this raises other questions: what about other cases like possible connections between dental consonants and the past or the accomplished (apart from IE languages, Japanese ta, to, possibly te), vowel alternations (Georgian: u- / i- / a- as  verbal prefixes; wolof: noun classifier + I (proximal), A (distal), U (undetermined + lexical post-determiner). In other words: if N in Georgian should eventually be accepted as negative, would this raise the question of -u in nu, its connections with other occurrences of u in the same language, therefore a compositional analysis of morphemes.

5)     If the nasal connection is validated in some cases at least; what would it mean?
How is the motivation, if any, oriented: from intended meaning to the selection of sound, or from the construal of meaning out of the sounds' proprioceptive properties ? And which ones? (multimodality: essential visual, auditory and tactile properties) And how are they distributed in the environment and between the interlocutors? for ex: I / a = proximal / distal if one relies on tactile iconicity (closed / opened) and absolute auditory iconicity (Doppler effect: treble / bass) but in terms of relative auditory iconicity I can be dissociative and A associative (A = "echoing effect" = will be responded by perceivable harmonics in confined environments while /i/ will not. I tested this with my daughter in a cave: all tourists present tested the echo with loud /a/s; just for fun I tested a shrill /i:/, with no success at all, "why does it not work with me? Is there a power cut or something?" and everybody burst out laughing, including those who did not speak French, because they had this intuitive knowledge (acquired through experience) of the interactional properties of sounds on the environment - sounds may not have actual meaning but they are not "cognitively neutral" and I suspect that the root of motivation (not determination), when motivation does happen, is to be found in this kind of phenomenon.

Many linguists are reluctant to raise questions like that of the "nasal connection" because we have a feeling that if we open Pandora's box all hell is going to break out loose, iconicity, phonosymbolism, cratylian motivation and all that. I wish the current discussions were the opportunity to reconsider those questions methodically - actually make the problematics explicit and elaborate scientific protocols to establish the data in the first place since even "what is data" in this domain cannot be taken for granted; at least we'd know wheter ther is a question at all since obviously there is reason to doubt it.

This might also be an opportunity to bridge a gap between typology and theories which raise serious questions (cognition, embodiment, distribution, intersubjectivity, language formation and acquisition) but from other disciplines's standpoints and without the linguistic data required to be accurate and avoid postulating universals that ignore diversity.

Best regards

Didier Bottineau

CNRS, UMR 7114 MoDyCo 

Université Paris 10, Bât. L, R12D

200 avenue de la République

92001 NANTERRE

01 40 97 40 72

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