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Part of
Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Ella Wehrmeyer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 108] 2023
► pp. 30–65

Chapter 2
Negative Concord in Sign Language of the Netherlands

A journey through a corpus

| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam

In a Negative Concord (NC) configuration, two negative elements co-occur in a clause but the polarity of that clause still remains negative. NC involving two manual negators has been observed in various sign languages, but relevant examples are usually presented in the context of broader investigations on negation in a particular sign language. Also, examples are not usually drawn from natural discourse. In this chapter, we offer the first comprehensive study on NC in a single sign language, namely, the Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), based entirely on corpus data. We find that NC is attested in NGT, but that it is optional and rather infrequent. First, our contribution is of a typological nature, as we distinguish different types of NC and compare our corpus-based results with those reported for other signed and spoken languages. Second, we describe in detail our “journey”, that is, our search procedure and inclusion criteria, thereby offering methodological guidelines for future endeavors.

Keywords: Corpus NGT, cross-modal typology, doubling, negation, Negative Concord, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Negative Concord
    • 2.1Types of Negative Concord
    • 2.2Negative Concord in sign languages
  • 3.Method: A journey through corpus data
    • 3.1Corpus NGT
    • 3.2Searching for potential instances of Negative Concord
    • 3.3Estimating the frequency of Negative Concord
    • 3.4Filtering out irrelevant examples
  • 4.Back from the journey: Patterns of Negative Concord in NGT
    • 4.1NC involving basic clause negator and neg-word
      • 4.1.1Corpus examples
      • 4.1.2Comparative perspective
    • 4.2NC involving negative modals
      • 4.2.1Corpus examples
      • 4.2.2Comparative perspective
    • 4.3Doubling
      • 4.3.1Corpus examples
      • 4.3.2Comparative perspective
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1NGT – A Negative Concord language?
    • 5.2Sociolinguistic considerations
    • 5.3Cross-modal considerations
    • 5.4Methodological considerations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.108.02van
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