[Lingtyp] Expletive derivational negation (revisited)

[Salminen, Jutta]

Dear all (who recently discussed the phenomenon of derivational
expletive negation),








I was informed about this conversation last week and will now add my
contribution to it with a little delay. I couldn’t respond directly
to the thread, since I just joined the list, but I shortly cite here
the relevant questions and conclusions that I will comment from my
perspective:








Bastian Persohn (_Fri Aug 16 11:55) _“– – Their closest
relatives are probably found in instances like Un-fall ‚accident‘
< Fall ‚case‘, i.e. ‚the undesirable case‘ or Un-tier
‚monster‘, lit ‚un-animal‘. What all these have in common is a
negative element, albeit in the subjective rather than the material
domain.”



Tim Zingler (_Fri Aug 16 12:15_): „I like the idea that the function
has shifted as part of a subjectification (?) process. Does that
happen with negators cross-linguistically?”



 



My case is not literally parallel to the lexical negators and lexemes
discussed in the thread so far, but there are similarities on the
general level. 



In my dissertation (Salminen 2020 [1]), I studied the Finnish verb
_epäillä_ ‘doubt; suspect, suppose,’ which – as the
translations reveal – can have basically two opposite meanings ‘to
think that something is, or is not the case.’ But besides the
material negation or the lack of it (to apply the term from B.
Persohn), undesirability plays a key role in motivating the connection
and the diachronic shift from the negation-inclining to the
affirmation-inclining meaning of this verb: very often _epäillä _is
used to either doubt something desirable or suspect something
undesirable, which both share the tone of undesirability. (I keep the
description of the variation here very short and simplified; it can be
read in English in a nutshell in my 2018 paper [2], and in more detail
in Finnish in other parts of my dissertation.) 
What is perhaps most interesting for the current discussion, is the
fact that the verb _epä-illä _is derived from a negator: _epä _is a
present participial form of the Finnish negative auxiliary,
historically also used as a 3SG form of it (cf. _ei_). (The same
morpheme also functions as a prefix, e. g. _epämukava
_‘unpleasant,’ but in the verb _epäillä _functions_ _as a
derivational base. The possible chain of derivation is: _epä >
evätä _‘refuse, decline’ > _epäillä _(frequentative).) 



Since, a notable part of this verb’s use in present day Finnish
lacks the interpretation of material negation and denotes “only”
undesirability or some other aspect of evaluative negativity, it can
be seen as one (complex) example of a diachronic change, where a
negator developed more subjective meaning(s) of negativity (instead or
besides the negation proper). 



Lastly, all the mentioned meanings are still available for
_epäillä, _and they are dependent on the clausal, sentential and
wider context of the verb.








Best regards,



Jutta







_________________
Dr. Jutta Salminen
Postdoktorand / postdoc-tutkija, FT
Lektorin für Finnisch / suomen lehtori

Institut für Fennistik und Skandinavistik
Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3
17489 Greifswald
jutta.salminen at uni-greifswald.de
Tel.: +49 (0)3834 420 3601

www.uni-greifswald.de/fennistik



Links:
------
[1]
https://helda.helsinki.fi/items/013d254d-e401-4ffe-ae09-372e60d6ffb6
[2]
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/fol.15030.sal
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