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Negation and Negative Concord: The view from Creoles
Edited by Viviane Déprez and Fabiola Henri
[Contact Language Library 55] 2018
► pp. 289–311

Cross-linguistic negation contrasts in co-convergent contact languages

Sri Lankan contact Malay (SLM) and Portuguese (SLP) share sprachbund-discordant features, including pre-verbal functional markers for TMA and negation. Yet their negation strategies also differ. In SLM, negation morphology is a diagnostic for the finiteness status of verbs. SLP verbs are contrastively negated, based on aspectual (not tense/finiteness) contrasts, and participles in adjunct clauses have distinctive non-finite negation. SLM marks finiteness status on matrix auxiliaries in a biclausal periphrastic construction. In the SLP construction, auxiliary and participle cannot be independently negated and the auxiliary cannot be separated from the verbal complex, arguing against biclausal status. SLM marks negative polarity in quantified nominal constituents, but has no negative concord, whereas SLP has negative concord, but relatively little negative polarity marking.
Keywords: negation, Sri Lankan Malay, Sri Lankan Portuguese, negative concord, negative polarity, finiteness, periphrastic perfect, constituent negation, biclausality, FinP
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The non-periphrastic verb forms and negation
  • 3.The periphrastic perfect construction and negation
  • 4.The finiteness contrast in negation increases the visibility of event structure contrasts
  • 5.Negative polarity and negative concord
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Abbreviation
  • Notes
  • References
  • Author query


This article is available free of charge.

Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.55.13slo
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