Double negatives: morphology in contact
Prof. Maria Cristina Cuervo
Natalia Mazzaro
Sentential negation with preverbal n-words displays a crosslinguistic contrast in the presence/absence of a negative element, as illustrated with Spanish (1) and French (2) below. Analyses of this contrast account for this variation in terms of some kind of syntactic parametric variation –in strength of features, movement, etc.– (see Bosque, 1994; Laka, 1994; Haegeman, 1995; Zannuttini, 1997; among others).
1) Nadie (*no) abrió la puerta
Nobody NEG opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.
2) Personne *( n)’a ouvert la porte
Nobody NEG has opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.
This contrast is not only found across languages but also within dialects of one language (see Franco & Landa 2006 for Basque Spanish, for instance). In Corrientes – Argentine - Spanish (CS), a variety in contact with Guaraní, the negative clitic no can appear with a preverbal n-word, as shown in (3). Interestingly, the Standard Spanish (SS) variant without no is also accepted (4):
3) Nunca no nos pasó nada (D:164)
Never NEG us happened nothing
'Nothing ever happened to us.'
4) Nunca nos controlaron (D:237)
Never us check
‘They never checked on us’
We present new data which show that this variation exists not only within the same variety of Spanish, but within the same speaker as well. We propose a morphological account of the phenomenon which draws a parallelism between variation in the cooccurrence of a preverbal n-word and the negative clitic –to which we refer as negative doubling- and variation in direct object clitic doubling. Previous approaches seem ill suited to account for variation within the same speaker, since they would suggest speakers have two distinct grammars.
In order to determine the prevalence of negative doubling in the speech community, we conducted and analysed 12 sociolinguistic interviews, each an hour and a half long. The 12 native speakers of CS are distributed along the social categories of sex, age, social class and literacy. The analysis yielded a total of 134 tokens of standard preverbal negation and negative doubling. The results show that negative doubling has an overall rate of occurrence of 17% and that it is present in all layers of society, with women leading in the rate of its use (68%). Concerning the linguistic factors tested, analysis of specificity of the n-word indicates that while the standard variant can have either a specific (44%) or non-specific (56%) reference, negative doubling constructions are almost categorically specific (88%). Specificity, however, was difficult to test with tampoco ‘neither’ and ni ‘nor’.
Negative doubling emerges as the lack of complementarity in distribution of agreeing no and a preverbal n-word, just as clitic doubling is lack of complementarity between an argument DP and an agreeing clitic. We propose, in the spirit of Watanabe 2001, that no is the negative clitic which spells out the Neg head as default, that is, when the specifications of no other lexical items are met. In SS, the item ø rather than no is inserted when SpecNeg is filled. Under this view, the variation found in CS is not a difference in structure or feature strength, which would imply subject-internal variation in core syntax. Here the variation is reduced to variation on the specification of the lexical items ø and no, and is localized in the lexicon (Adger & Smith, 2002). Although of similar nature, this approach crucially differs from Franco & Landa’s (2006) in that it does not depend on their claim –proven wrong by data such as in (1)– that preverbal n-words are contrastively focused and receive main stress. This account can also capture the fact that negative doubling not only occurs with argumental n-words but with negative adverb tampoco ‘neither’ and conjunction ni ‘nor’.
Natalia Mazzaro
Sentential negation with preverbal n-words displays a crosslinguistic contrast in the presence/absence of a negative element, as illustrated with Spanish (1) and French (2) below. Analyses of this contrast account for this variation in terms of some kind of syntactic parametric variation –in strength of features, movement, etc.– (see Bosque, 1994; Laka, 1994; Haegeman, 1995; Zannuttini, 1997; among others).
1) Nadie (*no) abrió la puerta
Nobody NEG opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.
2) Personne *( n)’a ouvert la porte
Nobody NEG has opened the door
'Nobody opened the door'.
This contrast is not only found across languages but also within dialects of one language (see Franco & Landa 2006 for Basque Spanish, for instance). In Corrientes – Argentine - Spanish (CS), a variety in contact with Guaraní, the negative clitic no can appear with a preverbal n-word, as shown in (3). Interestingly, the Standard Spanish (SS) variant without no is also accepted (4):
3) Nunca no nos pasó nada (D:164)
Never NEG us happened nothing
'Nothing ever happened to us.'
4) Nunca nos controlaron (D:237)
Never us check
‘They never checked on us’
We present new data which show that this variation exists not only within the same variety of Spanish, but within the same speaker as well. We propose a morphological account of the phenomenon which draws a parallelism between variation in the cooccurrence of a preverbal n-word and the negative clitic –to which we refer as negative doubling- and variation in direct object clitic doubling. Previous approaches seem ill suited to account for variation within the same speaker, since they would suggest speakers have two distinct grammars.
In order to determine the prevalence of negative doubling in the speech community, we conducted and analysed 12 sociolinguistic interviews, each an hour and a half long. The 12 native speakers of CS are distributed along the social categories of sex, age, social class and literacy. The analysis yielded a total of 134 tokens of standard preverbal negation and negative doubling. The results show that negative doubling has an overall rate of occurrence of 17% and that it is present in all layers of society, with women leading in the rate of its use (68%). Concerning the linguistic factors tested, analysis of specificity of the n-word indicates that while the standard variant can have either a specific (44%) or non-specific (56%) reference, negative doubling constructions are almost categorically specific (88%). Specificity, however, was difficult to test with tampoco ‘neither’ and ni ‘nor’.
Negative doubling emerges as the lack of complementarity in distribution of agreeing no and a preverbal n-word, just as clitic doubling is lack of complementarity between an argument DP and an agreeing clitic. We propose, in the spirit of Watanabe 2001, that no is the negative clitic which spells out the Neg head as default, that is, when the specifications of no other lexical items are met. In SS, the item ø rather than no is inserted when SpecNeg is filled. Under this view, the variation found in CS is not a difference in structure or feature strength, which would imply subject-internal variation in core syntax. Here the variation is reduced to variation on the specification of the lexical items ø and no, and is localized in the lexicon (Adger & Smith, 2002). Although of similar nature, this approach crucially differs from Franco & Landa’s (2006) in that it does not depend on their claim –proven wrong by data such as in (1)– that preverbal n-words are contrastively focused and receive main stress. This account can also capture the fact that negative doubling not only occurs with argumental n-words but with negative adverb tampoco ‘neither’ and conjunction ni ‘nor’.
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Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account
A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa
The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).
(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02) (2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)
Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.
(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11) (4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)
In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.
We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.