37.2856, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Understudied Aspects of Expletive Negation: Typological and Corpus-based Insights (Slovakia)

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Subject: 37.2856, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Understudied Aspects of Expletive Negation: Typological and Corpus-based Insights (Slovakia)

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Date: 04-Sep-2026
From: Karoliina Mäkilähde [karoliina.makilahde at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Understudied Aspects of Expletive Negation: Typological and Corpus-based Insights

Workshop at SLE 2027 - Understudied Aspects of Expletive Negation:
Typological and Corpus-based Insights

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2027/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics;
Typology

Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2026

Workshop title: Understudied aspects of expletive negation:
Typological and corpus-based insights
Workshop proposal for the 60th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea
Convenors:
Jesús Olguín-Martínez (University of Hong Kong)
Andreas Dufter (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Jutta Salminen (University of Helsinki)
Karoliina Mäkilähde (University of Helsinki)
Keywords: Expletive negation; typology; corpus linguistics; complex
sentences; simple clauses.
Description:
A number of works have investigated the grammatical properties of one
type of negation that has been characterized as semantically empty.
For instance, Spanish hasta ‘until’ clauses may occur with the
standard negative marker no (1). This marker is optional and can be
omitted without affecting the temporal relation holding between
clauses.
(1) Spanish (Indo-European)
el hombre no dormirá,
DET man NEG sleep.FUT.3SG
‘The man will not sleep,
hasta que la fiesta (no) comience.
until that DET party NEG start.PRS.SUBJ.3SG
until the party starts.’ (Olguín Martínez 2024a: 755)
The type of negative marker that occurs in the example in (1) is
known, in the literature, as EXPLETIVE NEGATION (see Salminen 2018:
264-266 for other terms that have been used in the literature). It
corresponds to cases in which a negative formative is used in a main
or subordinate clause (e.g., adverbial and complement clause) without
providing any truth-conditional contribution to interpretation
(Delfitto 2020; Delfitto et al. 2019; Espinal 1992: 49; Fortuin 2023).
The occurrence of expletive negation has been noticed for a long time
by Romance grammarians (Espinal 1992; Molina 2006; Prete 2008).
However, it has recently been noted that expletive negation is by no
means confined to Romance languages but occurs widely (Jin 2021; Jin
and Koenig 2021a). Jin and Koenig’s survey of 722 languages (2021b:
40) reports that 74 languages show examples of expletive negation.
While previous corpus-based and typological research has advanced our
theoretical understanding of expletive negation, much more work
remains to be done in this field.
Aims of the workshop
The workshop will bring together original research that contributes to
our understanding of understudied aspects of expletive negation in
independent main clauses and subordinate clauses. We welcome
contributions on any given language, family, or macro-area, as well as
broad typological studies. Potential contributions include, but are by
no means restricted to, the following:
1. Expletive negation-triggering contexts.
Different typological and corpus-based studies have provided
comprehensive lists of expletive negation-triggering contexts (e.g.,
Jin 2021; Jin and Koenig 2019, 2021ab; Mäkilähde 2025). For instance,
complement clauses of verbs of fear often contain an expletive
negative marker (see Dobrushina 2021). Expletive negation may also
occur in comparative clauses (Donati 2000), exclamatives (Delfitto and
Fiorin 2014), ‘before’ clauses (Tahar 2021), ‘unless’ clauses (Jin and
Koenig 2021a), and ‘without V-ing’ clauses (Olguín Martínez and
Peregrina Llanes 2023), among many others. Despite these comprehensive
lists of expletive negation-triggering contexts, more recent
typological work has shown that there may be more to the story in that
there are other constructions that may license expletive negation,
such as ‘let alone’ clauses (Olguín Martínez 2024b). Besides these
contexts discussed in previous research, are there any other expletive
negation-triggering contexts not identified by previous studies?
2. Functions of expletive negation.
Different studies have shown that expletive negation may not always be
semantically vacuous (e.g., Dobrushina 2021; Jin and Koenig 2021a).
They may have an expressive-evaluative layer of semantic
interpretation in that they serve to express the status of the
proposition with respect to the speaker’s overall knowledge (e.g.,
whether the propositional content of a construction is unlikely or
undesirable; Bordería and Schwenter 2005: 270; Yoon 2011: 146).
Moreover, it has been proposed that in a number of constructions,
expletive negation may not really be semantically empty, but somehow
reflects the negative interpretation of the construction. For French
avant que ‘before’ clauses, Tahar (2021: 620) notes that expletive
negation may be part of an enriched meaning of ‘before’. Besides these
functions identified in previous research, can expletive negation
serve other functions?
3. Interactions of expletive negation with other grammatical domains
in language use.
Expletive negation shows intriguing interactions with other
grammatical domains in language use. For instance, based on data from
Italian, Greco (2020) shows that there is an interesting interaction
between the use of expletive negation and the intonation pattern of
the construction where such expletive negative marker occurs. While
the analysis of such interactions is key to understanding the workings
of expletive negation from a more comprehensive perspective, they
remain largely understudied. Potential contributions to the workshop
could explore, for instance, how the presence or absence of expletive
negation may interact with specific lexical preferences in one or two
slots of the same construction by using corpus-based methods such as
(co-varying) collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003; Gries
and Stefanowitsch 2004) or multi-variate extensions of (co-varying)
collexeme analysis (Olguín Martínez and Gries 2024, 2026a).
4. Language contact and expletive negation.
There are studies that have shown that languages may develop expletive
negative markers due to language contact. For instance, different
Mesoamerican languages have borrowed expletive negation from Mexican
Spanish with its exact form (Olguín Martínez 2024c). This process is
referred to as matter replication (Sakel 2007). Conversely, there are
other Mesoamerican languages that have replicated expletive negation
from Mexican Spanish using native linguistic material (Olguín
Martínez 2024a), a process known as pattern replication (Sakel 2007).
While the role of language contact in the diffusion of expletive
negation has received some attention in the literature, much more work
remains to be done. In particular, little is known about whether
recipient languages not only borrow or copy expletive negation from a
donor language, but also adopt additional properties of the source
construction in which these expletive negative markers occur, such as
their discourse-pragmatic functions. Potential contributions to the
workshop could address this issue by applying corpus-based
quantitative methods that have recently been used to investigate
comparable language contact scenarios (e.g., Olguín Martínez and Gries
2025, 2026b).
5. Expletive negation, prescriptive grammar, and register.
In languages with a long-standing tradition of prescriptive grammar,
expletive negation has repeatedly been subject to normative scrutiny.
The use of negators that are semantically “redundant,” if not
“aberrant,” has been regarded as undesirable in the interest of
linguistic clarity and economy. Such normative pressure does indeed
appear to have contributed, in some cases, to a decline in the use of
expletive negation (cf. Stauf 1927: 206–210; Brunot 1966: 1866–1867
for French). Paradoxically, however, it has also, in some instances,
contributed to a revaluation of the more complex construction
involving expletive negation as more prestigious and elegant (cf.
Dufter 2025). The relationship between metalinguistic criticism and
the use and prestige of different forms of expletive negation
constitutes a further gap in the research, which this workshop could
help to address.
Please send provisional abstracts of no more than 100 words (excluding
references) in PDF format by November 10, 2026 to:
 - jfolguinmartinez at gmail.com
 - Dufter at lmu.de
 - jutta.salminen at helsinki.fi
 - karoliina.makilahde at helsinki.fi
If the workshop is approved, authors will be asked to submit revised
500-word abstracts according to the SLE guidelines.
References:
Borderia, Salvador Pons and Scott A. Schwenter. 2005. Polar meaning
and “expletive” negation in approximative adverbs: Spanish por poco
(no). Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6. 262-282.
Brunot, Ferdinand. 1966. Histoire de la langue française des origines
à nous jours. Tome 6: Le XVIIIe siècle. Deuxième partie: La langue
post-classique. Paris: Armand Colin.
Delfitto, Denis. 2020. Expletive negation. In Viviane Déprez and Maria
Teresa Espinal (eds.), The Oxford handbook of negation, 255-268.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Delfitto, Denis and Gaetano Fiorin. 2014. Negation in exclamatives.
Studia Linguistica 68. 284-327.
Delfitto, Denis, Chiara Melloni, and Maria Vender. 2019. The
(en)rich(ed) meaning of expletive negation. Evolutionary Linguistic
Theory 1. 57-79.
Dobrushina, Nina. 2021. Negation in complement clauses of fear-verbs.
Functions of Language 28. 121–152.
Donati, Caterina. 2000. A note on negation in comparison. Quaderni del
Dipartimento di Linguistica 10. 55-68.
Dufter, Andreas. 2025. Zur Geschichte von Optionalität: expletive
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(eds.), “Parla, e sie breve e arguto”. Festschrift für Maria Selig /
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Fortuin, Egbert. 2023. The function of extra negation: insights from
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expletive negation. Linguistic Typology 25(1). 39–78.
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Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 46–67. Frankfurt/Main:
University Library.
Mäkilähde, Karoliina. 2025. Expletive negation. A cross-linguistic
parallel corpus study. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Master’s
thesis.
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V-ing’ clauses: Clausal negative concomitance in typological
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Language 32. 339-365.
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doctoral dissertation.

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