[Lingtyp] Call for Papers - Workshop on "The Typology of Postverbal Negation", ICL-20 (2-6 July 2018)

Wed May 31 12:26:37 UTC 2017

Call for Papers: The typology of postverbal negation
Dear Colleagues,
We (Johan van der Auwera and Olga Krasnoukhova, University of Antwerp), are organizing a 1 day Workshop on 'The typology of postverbal negation' at ICL 20, the International Congress of Linguists at Cape Town, 2-6 July 2018.
The description of the workshop follows below, and can be also found at: http://www.icl20capetown.com/images/WorkshopSummaries/24.-The-typology-of-postverbal-negation.pdf.
We would like to encourage interested colleagues to submit an abstract. Please feel free to contact us (johan.vanderauwera at uantwerpen.be , olga.krasnoukhova at uantwerpen.be) if you have any queries.
The website of the Congress with preliminary information regarding themes and plenary speakers is http://www.icl20capetown.com/.
Important dates: The deadline for abstract submission is 24 July 2017. To submit an abstract, please follow the link on the conference's website.

With best regards,
Johan van der Auwera and Olga Krasnoukhova

Workshop description:

Workshop title: The typology of 'post-verbal' negation
Conveners: Johan van der Auwera and Olga Krasnoukhova, University of Antwerp

The cross-linguistic comparison of standard negation reveals a universal tendency to have a clausal negator before the verb. This tendency has first been observed by Jespersen (1917: 5). It is often referred to as the 'Negative-First Principle' (after Horn 1989, 2001), and has been confirmed by a number of studies since then, e.g. Dahl (2010: 23-24), and it is most visible in Dryer's maps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer 2013). Despite this tendency, a sizable proportion of the world's languages express negation after the verb, and a good number of these languages seem to cluster in areas, including the 'Macro Sudan Belt', New Guinea and South America (see Güldemann 2007, Reesink 2002, Vossen 2016). In this workshop the typological questions of what? where? And why? will be asked. The following issues need elucidation:
(i) A negator can either appear immediately after the verb or at the end of the clause - or somewhere in between. Languages can also exhibit more than one type of postverbal negation. It needs to be made more precise what type postverbal languages resort under.
(ii) The term 'postverbal' does not make it clear what type of verb it is that the negator follows. Is it the lexical verb or is it the auxiliary, when there is one? Currently, both approaches are used, both in grammars and in cross-linguistic work (e.g. Dahl 1979, 2010; Miestamo 2005; Dryer 2013). This makes generalizations hazardous. The compatibility as well as the rationale of both approaches need attention.
(iii) What explains the existence of postverbal negation? Currently available hypotheses, all diachronic, are (a) Jespersen's cycle, which typically doubles up a preverbal negator with a postverbal one and may leave the postverbal one as the sole exponent of negation (van der Auwera 2009), (b) the reinterpretation of a clause-final or extra-clausal right periphery particle as negator, and (c) the reinterpretation of a clause-final verb as a negator (e.g. Givón 1978: 89). It is currently unclear which hypothesis is relevant where, whether the above list is complete or whether the hypotheses are compatible with one another.
(iv) Is the choice of a postverbal negation connected to other word order choices? While it is clear that postverbal negation is not determined by any other word order constellation, there may still be a statistical correlation, at least for subtypes of postverbal negation.
(v) Negation can be 'morphologized' into the position of negative affixes and clitics either preceding or following the verb stem, but pace Bybee (1985: 177) there does not seem to be any prefixing preference (Dryer 2013). The lack of correspondence between morphology and syntax needs further work.
(vi) The documented prevalence of postverbal negator in the three above mentioned areas suggests that postverbal negation can arise or be reinforced through language contact (e.g. Reesink 2002:247, Idiatov 2015).
(vii) There is a difference between, at least, verbal negation, existential negation, imperative negation and the negation expressed in pronouns or adverbs (Miestamo 2005, Croft 1991, Veselinova 2013, van der Auwera & Lejeune 2005, Haspelmath 1997). It is unclear whether, how and why negation placement can differ across these domains.

The workshop will address the above questions in individual languages and language families, as well as from a comparative perspective.

References:
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation Between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Croft, William Croft. 1991. The evolution of negation. Journal of Linguistics 27: 1-27.
Dahl, Östen. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17: 79-106.
Dahl, Östen. 2010. Typology of negation. In Laurence R. Horn (ed.) The Expression of negation, 9-38. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dryer, Matthew. 2013. Order of negative morpheme and verb. In Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/143, Accessed in December 2016).
Givón, Talmy. 1978. Negation in language: Pragmatics, function, ontology. In Peter Cole (ed.) Pragmatics, 69-112. New York: Academic Press.
Güldemann, Tom. 2007. The Macro-Sudan belt: towards identifying a linguistic area in northern sub-Saharan Africa. In Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse (eds.) A Linguistic Geography of Africa, pp. 151-185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 1989 (2nd edn. 2001). A natural history of negation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2015. Clause-final negative markers in Bobo and Samogo: parallel evolution and contact. Journal of Historical Linguistics 5: 235-266.
Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Kopenhagen: Høst.
Miestamo, Matti. 2005. Standard negation. The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reesink, Ger P. 2002. Clause-final negation, structure and interpretation. Functions of Language 9: 239-268.
van der Auwera, Johan. 2009. The Jespersen Cycles. In Elly van Gelderen (ed.) Cyclical change, pp. 35-71. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
van der Auwera, Johan & Ludo Lejeune, with Valentin Goussev. 2005. The prohibitive. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures, 290-293. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Veselinova, Ljuba. 2013. Negative existentials: a cross-linguistic study.  Italian Journal of Linguistics 25: 107-145.
Vossen, Frens. 2016. Towards a typology of the Jespersen Cycles. Doctoral dissertation, University of Antwerp.

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