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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 35–51

Chapter 3
French negative concord and discord

An experimental investigation of contextual and prosodic disambiguation

| Rutgers University
| Rutgers University

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.

Keywords: negative concord, double negation, prosody of French negative concord, context influence
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
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.03dep
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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 DOI logo
Etxeberria, Urtzi, M.Teresa Espinal & Susagna Tubau
2024. Establishing the limits between Polarity Sensitivity, Negative Polarity and Negative Concord. Linguistic Typology 0:0 DOI logo

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