[Lingtyp] Negation marks adverbial clauses

[Yanwei Jin]

Dear all,

I think someone has already mentioned my work (with my advisor) *A
cross-linguistic study of expletive negation* published in Linguistic
Typology last year where we went over 722 languages, studied  5 languages
in depth, collected a comprehensive list of expletive negation triggers
(e.g., fear, before, prevent, almost, refuse, etc.), and provided a
semantic and psycholinguistic account why this might be the case. I further
expanded that paper with an investigation of more languages and several
psycholinguistic experiments into my dissertation (*Negation on your mind:
A cross-linguistic and psycholinguistic study of expletive negation*) which
can be downloaded from Proquest. If anyone is interested in both works but
has no access to them, I can send them to you.

I am very interested to know that "as long as" also seems to trigger
expletive negation as I did not notice this one when I was going over more
than a thousand grammars in my dissertation. This is a new trigger for me
to think about how to fit its semantic analysis into my previous account.

I should also point out that even in English, you can find expletive
negation examples that borderline non-standard usage (or maybe dialect) and
speech errors in spontaneous speech. Horn (2010) calls such usages
"violations in parole".

a. I'll *miss* not seeing you around.
b. Well, really, how do I *keep from* not worrying?
c. It's been ages *since* I haven't posted anything here.
d. I don't know if I can *hold myself back from* not watching it.

I had lots of these English examples in my published paper and
dissertation. What is fascinating here is that the expletive negation
triggers found in English are highly similar to those in French, Mandarin,
etc where expletive negation exists profusely, suggesting that this
phenomenon definitely has some shared cognitive underpinnings across
languages. What is truly different across languages is the degree to which
expletive negation use is conventionalized.

Reference
Jin, Yanwei & Jean-Pierre Koenig. 2021. A cross-linguistic study of
expletive nega­tion. Linguistic Typology 25(1). 39-78.
Jin, Yanwei. 2021. Negation on your mind: A cross-linguistic and
psycholinguistic study of expletive negation. Buffalo, NY: University at
Buffalo dissertation.
Hom, Lawrence. 2010. Multiple negation in English and other languages. In
Lawrence Horn (ed.), The expression of negation, 111-148. Berlin: De
Gruyter Mouton.




On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 10:18 AM mohammad rasekh <mrasekhmahand at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Dear All,
> I hope you have started a happy new year.
> In the corpus of one of my students in Hamedani Persian (a variety spoken
> in Hamedan, west of Iran), we have found some adverbial clauses in which
> the verb is marked by negative prefix, but it does not mean negative. These
> adverbial clauses mark Time (meaning 'as soon as') and Reason, or both at
> the same time. Some examples:
>
> 1.        *i               ke            kur          na-šod, man
> diye          ruz-e xoš                 na-didam*
>
>         he            that         blind       NEG-become, I    anymore
> day-EZ happy     NEG-see-1SG
>         As soon as he got blind, I had no good times.
>
> 2.      *das       ke         ne-mi-ke**š**-i**
>                         ru har**č**i,                       x**ā**k-e*
>
>        hand     that      NEG-IND-touch-2SG               over     everything,
>       dirty-BE.3SG
>
>     As you touch everything, it is dirty.
> I wonder if there is any other language in which the adverbial clause is
> negative in form but not in meaning. I searched to find some evidence or
> some sources which mention this, but I was not successful. I appreciate
> your comments.
> Best regards,
> Mohammad
>
> Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand
> Linguistics Department,
> Bu-Ali Sina University,
> Hamedan, Iran.
> Postal Code: 6517838695
> https://basu.academia.edu/MohammadRasekhmahand
>
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>
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