Chapter 3
French negative concord and discord
An experimental investigation of contextual and prosodic disambiguation
Evidence that DN readings arise in solid NC languages more than previously thought (Déprez et al. 2015) underscore the importance of investigating the factors governing their emergence to deepen our understanding of Negative Concord. This paper examines the roles of context and prosody in disambiguating simple French transitive sentences with two NCIs (personne, rien) experimentally. French speakers were recorded reading target sentences with NCIs in NC or DN eliciting contexts followed by a verification statement judged as T/F and analyzed as context-matching or not. Context-matching targets were extracted using Praat and analyzed using ProsodyPro (Xu 2013). Sentence contour, average pitch and F0 peak value on NCIs were compared across conditions. Our results provide solid evidence that in French, context influence interpretation and NC and DN interpretations are prosodically distinguished.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 3.Experimental background
- 4.Experimental design
- 5.Participants and procedure
- 6.Analysis
- 7.Results: Context influence
-
8.Results: Acoustic analysis
- 9.Discussion
- 10.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Blanchette, Frances & Cynthia Lukyanenko
2019.
Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap.
Frontiers in Psychology 10
Etxeberria, Urtzi, M.Teresa Espinal & Susagna Tubau
2024.
Establishing the limits between Polarity Sensitivity, Negative Polarity and Negative Concord.
Linguistic Typology 0:0
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