[Lingtyp] Negation marks adverbial clauses
Juergen Bohnemeyer
jb77 at buffalo.edu
Wed Jan 12 20:59:53 UTC 2022
Dear all — It seems that there are two separate sources of the association between anterior clauses and negation: one is expletive negation, as mentioned by Yanwei Jin and several other people in this thread; the other is the expression of anteriority via a negated iamitive, ’not yet’, as noted by Pier Marco, and I believe there were also other examples of this in the thread as well. Yucatec has the second construction, e.g.,
(1) Ma’ síih-ik José=e’ káa=h-síih Pablo
NEG be.born-SUBJ(B3SG) José=D3 CON=PRV-be.born(B3SG) Pablo
‘José had not yet been born, when/and then Pablo was born,’ i.e., Pable was born before José (Bohnemeyer 2002: 405)
Here, the iamitive meaning is expressed via subjunctive ’status’ marking on the verb, which is associated with iamitivity specifically in combination with negation and focus constructions.
How do we know that the two sources are distinct, i.e., that the negation in (1) is not expletive? First of all, the negation in (1) is literal: at the topic time, the time for which the matrix clause asserts Pablo’s birth, it was not the case that José had been born. In addition, subjunctive status by itself does not have iamitive semantics. Thus the negation of the first clause is in fact part of its propositional, truth-conditional meaning.
So these are two separate phenomena, even though they are superficially similar and easily confused.
Best — Juergen
Bohnemeyer, J. (2002). The grammar of time reference in Yukatek Maya. Munich: Lincom.
> On Jan 12, 2022, at 1:13 PM, Pier Marco Bertinetto <piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it> wrote:
>
> This may be a marginal observation, but not unrelated to the topic.
> In Ayoreo (Zamuco), the connector 'before' (as in: Before you came, I was worried) is expressed as
> uje cama [uhe kama]
> when not.yet
> (uje is a multifunctional connector, also expressing cause, and is also used as relative pronoun).
> This suggests a possible path for the negation to insinuate in a temporal clause, for there is an obvious connection between 'when not yet' and 'until not'.
> Best
> Pier Marco
>
>
>
>
> Il giorno mer 12 gen 2022 alle ore 16:14 Yanwei Jin <yanweiji at buffalo.edu> ha scritto:
> 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-keš-i ru harči, xāk-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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--
Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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University at Buffalo
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