[Lingtyp] Universal trend: biclausal -> monoclausal?

[Jorge Rosés Labrada]

Dear Martin,

Regarding your negability test, I am a non-native speaker of English so
take this with a grain of salt but your “I want[/would like] to not make
[any] mistake[s]” doesn’t sound so bad to me (perhaps with some emphatic
intonation on the negator).

And a collocation with a modal “could” and two negators (e.g. “I could not
not come”) is totally possible for me (with some emphatic intonation on the
second negator). It seems like at least in the COCA corpus, this is
attested (n=10):


Best,
Jorge
-------------
Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada
Assistant Professor, Indigenous Language Sustainability
Department of Linguistics
University of Alberta
Tel: (+1) 780-492-5698 <(+1)%20780-492-5698>
jrosesla at ualberta.ca

*The University of Alberta acknowledges that we are located on Treaty 6
territory, **and respects the history, languages, and cultures of the First
Nations, Métis, Inuit, **and all First Peoples of Canada, whose presence
continues to enrich our institution.*

On Nov 30, 2018, at 5:01 AM, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
wrote:


On 29.11.18 00:30, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:

It seems to be generally true that biclausal structures can become
monoclausal structures over time and not the reverse.


This is indeed an interesting observation that has not been discussed very
widely, I think. Harris & Campbell (1995) (in their book on diachronic
syntax) discuss such phenomena at some length, but they don't seem to
explain the unidirectionality. So it would be nice to see a convincing
explanation.


But in order to make this claim fully testable, one needs a general
definition of "clause", and I don't know of a very good definition. My
working definition is in terms of negatability: If a structure that
contains two verbs can be negated in two different ways, it's biclausal,
but otherwise it's monoclausal:


She was able [to do it]. (biclausal)


(She was not able to do it / She was able not to do it)


She could do it. (monoclausal)


(She could not do it – there is no contrast between "she could [not do it]"
and "she could not [do it]")


This indicates that "want" clauses are monoclausal in English, because "I
want to not make a mistake" sounds bad. But the judgements are subtle, and
one may perhaps even have something like "The king ordered the
non-destruction of the city" (vs. "The king didn't order the distruction of
the city", which is normally considered monoclausal).


So the negation criterion isn't very good, but I know of no better way of
distinguishing in general between monoclausal and biclausal constructions.


Martin


-- 

Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Kahlaische Strasse 10

D-07745 Jena

&

Leipzig University

Institut fuer Anglistik

IPF 141199

D-04081 Leipzig






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