Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.

Introduction by Chungmin Lee. - Section I. Negation. - 1. Dynamic Pragmatic View of Negation Processing by Ye Tian & Richard Breheny. - 2. A Featural Approach to Sign Language Negation by Roland Pfau. - 3. Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and its Organisation with Speech by Simon Harrison & Pierre Larrivée. - 4. A Child s Multimodal Negations from 1 to 4: The Interplay between Modalities by Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Aliyah Morgenstern & Dominique Boutet. - Section II. - 5. When Negatives are easier to Understand than Affirmatives: The case of Negative Sarcasm by Rachel Giora. - 6. Double Negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction between Syntax and Prosody by M. Teresa Espinal, Susagna Tubau, Joan Borràs-Comes & Pilar Prieto. - 7. The Markedness of Double Negation by Pierre Larrivée. - 8. Identifying the role of Pragmatic Activation in Changes to the Expression of English Negation by Phillip Wallage. - 9. Metalinguistically Negated vs. Descriptively Negated Adverbials: ERP Evidence by Chungmin Lee. - 10. An Experimental Study of Neg-Raising in Korean by Sungbom Lee & Seung Jin Hong. - Section III. - 11. Licensing NPIs: Some Negative (and Positive) Results by Laurence R. Horn. - 12. Another look at NPIs in Definite Descriptions. An Experimental Approach by Jon Gajewski. - 13. Input vs. Output in the Acquisition of Negative Polarity: The Curious case of
any
by Lyn Tieu. - 14. The Significance of Formal Features in Language Change Theory and the Evolution of Minimizers by Montserrat Batllori.