Cover not available
Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 40:3 (2016) ► pp.473–512

On the typology of negative concord

| University of Antwerp

This paper has three main points. First, contrary to what is often stated, negative concord is not all that frequent and certainly not the most frequent strategy to express single clausal negation in a clause with an indefinite noun phrase or adverbial in the scope of the negation. Second, the subtype of negative concord called ‘strict negative concord’ is much more frequent than the subtype of ‘non-strict negative concord’. These two claims are based on a worldwide sample of 179 languages. Third, it is argued that non-strict negative concord shows too much variation for it to be seen as the one choice of a two-way split between strict and non-strict negative concord. Given the relative rarity of non-strict negative concord, this claim is not based on the worldwide sample, but on a survey of the research literature.

Published online: 18 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.40.3.01van
References
Bickerton, Derek
1981 Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
Borsley, Robert D. & Bob Morris Jones
2005 Welsh negation and grammatical theory. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Breitbarth, Anne
2014 The history of Low German negation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chelliah, Shobhana Lakshmi
1997 A grammar of Meithei. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chung, Sandra
1998 The design of agreement. Evidence from Chamorro. Chicago: Chicago University press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2010 Typology of negation. In Lauren R. Horn (ed.), The expression of negation, 1–38. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
den Besten, Hans
1986 Double negation and the genesis of Afrikaans. In Pieter Muysken & Norval Smith (eds.), Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis. Papers from the Amsterdam Workshop, April 1985 , 185–230. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
de Swart, Henriëtte
2010 Expression and interpretation of negation. An OT typology. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Detges, Ulrich & Richard Waltereit
2002 Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semantic-pragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 211. 151–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S
2000 Counting genera vs. counting languages. Linguistic Typology 41. 334–350.Google Scholar
2013a Order of subject, object and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. [URL]. (Accessed 9 Feb 2015).Google Scholar
2013b Position of negative morpheme with respect to subject, object and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. [URL]. (Accessed 12 Nov 2015).Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. & Martin Haspelmath
(eds.) 2013 The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL].Google Scholar
Dum-Tragut, Jasmine
2002 Word order correlations and word order change. München: LINCOM.Google Scholar
2009 Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Falaus, Anamaria
2008 Romanian n-words as negative quantifiers. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14: Article 101. [URL]. (Accessed 15 Feb 2015).Google Scholar
Fattier, Dominique
2013 Haitian Creole. In Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath & Magnus Huber (eds.), The survey of pidgin and creole languages. Volume II. Portuguese-based, Spanish-based and French-based languages, 195–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Giannakidou, Anastasia
1998 Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006  N-words and negative concord. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax, Volume III1, 327–391. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grevisse, Maurice
1980 Le bon usage. Grammaire française avec des Remarques sur la langue française d’aojourd’hui (11ième édition). Paris: Duculot.Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
2012 On the evolution of temporal n-words in Medieval French. Language Sciences 341. 76–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Negation in the history of French. In Willis, et al. (eds.), 51–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 The grammaticalization of negative indefinites. The case of the temporal/aspectual n-words plus and mais in Medieval French. In Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti (eds.), The diachrony of negation, 185–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harms, Philip Lee
1994 Epena Pedee Syntax. Dallas, Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
1997 Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
2005 Negative indefinite pronouns and predicate negation. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 466–469. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2013 Negative indefinite pronouns and predicate negation. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. [URL]. (Accessed 1 Mar 2015).Google Scholar
Herburger, Elena
2001 The negative concord puzzle revisited. Natural Language Semantics 91. 278–303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Honti, László
1997 Die Negation im Uralischen II. Linguistica Uralica 331. 161–176.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R
1989 A natural history of negation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Pess.Google Scholar
Howe, Darin
2005 Negation in African American Vernacular English. In Yoko Iyeri (ed.), Aspects of English negation, 173–203. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutchison, John P
1981 The Kanuri language reference grammar. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Ingham, Richard
2006 On two negative concord dialects in early English. Language Variation and Change 181. 241–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Israel, Michael
2011 The pragmatics of polarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Neil G
2005 Yiddish: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1917 Negation in English and other languages. København: A. F. Høst & Søn.Google Scholar
1922 Language. Its nature, development and origin. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Johanson, Lars
2002 Structural factors in Turkic language contacts. Richmond: Curzon Press.Google Scholar
Kahrel, Peter
1996 Aspects of negation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam doctoral disseration.Google Scholar
Khanjian, Hrayr
2010 Negative concord in Western Armenian. Paper presented at Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 36) , University of California, Berkeley, CA. [URL]. (Accessed 14 Jan 2013). DOI logo
King, Tracy Holloway
1996 Licensing negative pronominals in Georgian. In Proceedings of the twenty-second annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on the role of learnability in grammatical theory , 232–243. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Křížková, Helena
1968 K voprosu o tak nazyxaemoj dvojnoj negacii v slaljanskix jazykax. Slavia 371. 21–39.Google Scholar
Laka, Itziar
1994 On the syntax of negation. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Larrivée, Pierre & Richard P. Ingham
(eds.) 2011 The evolution of negation. Beyond the Jespersen cycle. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lucas, Christopher
2009 The development of negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic. Cambridge: University of Cambridge doctoral dissertation.Google Scholar
2013 Negation in the history of Arabic and Afro-Asiatic. In Willis, et al. (eds.), 399–452. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mark, Yudl
1978 Gramatik fun der yidisher klal-shrpakh. New York: Alveltehker yidisher kulturkongres.Google Scholar
Martineau, France & Raymond Mougeon
2003 A sociolinguistic study of the origins of ne deletin in European and Quebeck French. Language 791. 118–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martins, Ana Maria
2000 Polarity items in Romance: Underspecification and lexical change. In Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas & Anthony Warner (eds.), Diachronic syntax. Models and mechanisms, 191–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mathesius, Vilém
1937 Double negation and grammatical concord. In Mélanges de linguistique et philologie offerts à Jacq. van Ginneken à l’occasion du soixantième anniversaire de sa naissance (21 avril 1937), 79–83. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Miestamo, Matti
2005 Standard negation. The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Molinelli, Pierra
1988 Fenomeni della negazione dal latino all’italiano. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.Google Scholar
Muller, Claude
1991 La négation en français. Syntaxe, sémantique et éléments de comparaison avec les autres langues romanes. Genève: Droz.Google Scholar
Nejmann, Daisy L
2001 Colloquial Icelandic. The complete course for beginners. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nivre, Joakim
2002 Three perspectives on Swedish indefinite determiners. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 251. 3–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parry, Mair
2013 Negation in the history of Italy-Romance. In Willis, et al. (eds.), 77–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Penka, Doris
2011 Negative indefinites. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Posner, Rebecca
1984 Double negatives, negative polarity and negative incorporation in Romance: A historical and comparative view. Transactions of the Philological Society 821. 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Alsenoy, Lauren
2011 Negative expressions involving indefinites in African languages. Papers of the Linguistic Society of Belgium 61. [URL].Google Scholar
2014 A new typology of indefinite pronouns, with a focus on negative indefinites. Antwerp: University of Antwerp doctoral dissertation.Google Scholar
Van Alsenoy, Lauren & Johan van der Auwera
2014 On the relation between double clausal negation and negative concord. In Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti (eds.), The diachrony of negation, 13–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Indefinite pronouns in Uralic languages. In Matti Miestamo, Beáta Wagner-Nagy & Ann Tamm (eds.), Negation in Uralic languages, 519–546. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan
2009 The Jespersen cycles. In Elly van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical change, 35–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Review article of Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology by Henriëtte de Swart. Language 871. 845–865. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Les indéfinis négatifs dans les langues créoles. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française 321. 27–43.Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan, Ludovic De Cuypere & Annemie Neuckermans
2006 Negative indefinites: A typological and diachronic perspective on a Brabantic construction. In Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola & Mikko Laitinen (eds.), Types of variation. Diachronic, dialectal and typological interfaces, 305–319. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan & P. Gybels
2014 On negation, indefinites and negative indefinites in Yiddish. In Bjoern Hansen & Marion Aptroot (eds.), Yiddish language structures, 193–249. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan & Frens Vossen
2016 Jespersen cycles in Mayan, Quechuan and Maipurean languages. In Elly Van Gelderen (ed.), Linguistic Cycles II1, 189–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera & Lauren Van Alsenoy
In print. More ado about nothing: On the typology of negative indefinites. In Ken Turner & Laurence R. Horn (eds.) An atlas of meaning Leiden Brill
Willis, David
2011 Negative polarity and the quantifier cycle: Comparative diachronic perspectives from European languages. In Larriveé & Ingham (eds.), 285–323. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Negation in the history of the Brythonic Celtic languages. In Willis, et al. (eds.), 238–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Willis, David, Christopher Lucas & Anne Breitbarth
2013 Comparing diachronies of negation. In Willis et al. (eds.), 1–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(eds.) 2013 The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woidich, Manfred
2006 Das Kairenisch-Arabische: Eine Grammatik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde
2004 Sentential negation and negative concord. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam doctoral dissertation. [URL]. (Accessed 25 June 2013).Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 21 other publications

BLANCHETTE, FRANCES & CYNTHIA LUKYANENKO
2019. Unacceptable grammars? an eye-tracking study of English negative concord. Language and Cognition 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
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
Driemel, Imke, Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić, Paloma Jeretič & Astrid van Alem
2023. Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language. Languages 8:3 ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Fortuin, Egbert
2023. The function of extra negation. Functions of Language 30:2 ► pp. 209 ff. DOI logo
Greco, Matteo
2022. From Latin to Modern Italian: Some Notes on Negation. Languages 7:1 ► pp. 46 ff. DOI logo
Hansen, Cynthia
2018. Subordinate and interrogative clause negation in Iquito. Linguistic Typology 22:1 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard
2021. Cyclic changes to the negative coordinating conjunction from Latin to Modern French. Folia Linguistica 55:s42-s2 ► pp. 223 ff. DOI logo
Hengeveld, Kees & J. Lachlan Mackenzie
2018. Negation in Functional Discourse Grammar. In Recent Developments in Functional Discourse Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 205], ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo
Krasnoukhova, Olga & Johan van der Auwera
2019. Negation in Kulina. Journal of Historical Linguistics 9:2 ► pp. 208 ff. DOI logo
Pickl, Simon
2021. Ein korpuslinguistischer Beitrag zu Herkunft und Entwicklung des negativen Indefinitums kein . Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 49:1 ► pp. 84 ff. DOI logo
Prescod, Paula
2018. Licensing negation and negative concord in Atlantic Creoles. In Negation and Negative Concord [Contact Language Library, 55], ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
TUBAU, SUSAGNA, URTZI ETXEBERRIA & M. TERESA ESPINAL
2023. A new approach to Negative Concord: Catalan as a case in point. Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
van Boven, Cindy, Marloes Oomen, Roland Pfau & Lotte Rusch
2023. Chapter 2. Negative Concord in Sign Language of the Netherlands. In Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 108], ► pp. 30 ff. DOI logo
van der Auwera, Johan
2017. Englishes, English creoles and their negative indefinites. In Negation and Contact [Studies in Language Companion Series, 183], ► pp. 115 ff. DOI logo
van der Auwera, Johan
2022. Nominal and pronominal negative concord, through the lens of Belizean and Jamaican Creole. Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 505 ff. DOI logo
van der Auwera, Johan
2023. Mixtec negative existential cycles, standard negation and negative indefiniteness. Lingua 292 ► pp. 103528 ff. DOI logo
van der Auwera, Johan & Tamirand Nnena De Lisser
2019. Negative Concord in Jamaican. Ampersand 6 ► pp. 100051 ff. DOI logo
VAN DER AUWERA, JOHAN, QUAN NGUYEN HAI, VIPAS POTHIPATH & STEFANIE SIEBENHÜTTER
2023. Existential indefinite constructions, in the world and in Mainland Southeast Asia. Journal of Linguistics 59:4 ► pp. 881 ff. DOI logo
van der Auwera, Johan & Frens Vossen
2017. Kiranti double negation. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 40:1 ► pp. 40 ff. DOI logo
Watkowska, Dorota
2021. Redundancy in ELF: A Corpus-Based Study on Negative and Modal Concord. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies :30/2 ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Ziegeler, Debra & Zhiming Bao
2017. Introduction. In Negation and Contact [Studies in Language Companion Series, 183], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.