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Article published In:
Functions of Language
Vol. 30:2 (2023) ► pp.209–237

The function of extra negation

Insights from the Dutch privative construction

ORCID logo | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL)

This paper provides insight into the phenomenon of extra negation, also known as non-compositional, expletive, or pleonastic negation. It provides a corpus-based analysis of the Dutch negative privative construction, which consists of zonder ‘without’ and niet ‘not’, in which one negation does not cancel the other. Two basic factors that trigger an extra negation are discussed, and an explanation of why these factors facilitate the use of an extra negation is offered. It is argued that the extra negation has a semantic-pragmatic function that is reminiscent of similar instances of extra negation in Dutch and other languages, specifically sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause containing a word which expresses implicit negation. It is shown that in complex hypotactic constructions, the extra negation is used to make explicit in the subordinate clause that the presupposition of non-occurrence is rejected.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work, terminology and possible explanations
  • 3.Data collection
  • 4.Main triggers for the negation
  • 5.Explanation of the triggers for the extra negation
  • 6.Comparison with compositional sentences
  • 7.Relations with other constructions
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Corpora used
  • References
Published online: 4 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.21047.for
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