Negation and negative concord in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol (in comparison with Portuguese, substrate-adstrate languages and other Portuguese Creoles)

Unlike its Portuguese source, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol is a strict negative concord (NC) language, meaning that everything that can be negative in a negative sentence must be negative: cf. Ningin ka bindi nada {nobody neg sell nothing} ‘Nobody sold anything’. Portuguese, in contrast, is a partial NC language: NC only obtains if no negative word precedes the negator: cf. O João não vendeu nada {the John neg sold nothing} ‘John didn’t sell anything’ vs. Ninguém vendeu nada {nobody sold nothing} ‘Nobody sold anything’.The present article attempts to account for this difference. First, it shows it cannot be directly ascribed to the influence of the languages Kriyol is mostly in contact with (Mandinka, Manjaku, Wolof) as they have anti-NC grammars in which generic nouns meaning ‘person’ or ‘thing’ are used in negative contexts with the meaning of negative polarity items such as anybody and anything. The transition from partial to strict NC is therefore likely to be an internal process, the main cause of which is identified as a change in the lexical category of the negator. Whereas Portuguese não is an adverb, Kriyol ka is a polarity marker belonging to the verbal complex along with TMA markers. (This is where contact languages may have interfered.) Formalizing the data in a linear syntax framework allows one to show how such a lexical difference will result in the observed syntactic difference, as well as to propose a few tentative generalizations about the possible occurrence of partial NC as a type, next to the more widespread strict NC (Kriyol), no-NC (Standard English), and anti-NC (Mandinka).

Published online: 12 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.55.11kih