Article published in:
Negation and Contact: With special focus on Singapore English
Edited by Debra Ziegeler and Zhiming Bao
[Studies in Language Companion Series 183] 2017
► pp. 171–206

Quantification under negative scope in Singapore English

| Université Paris 3
Earlier studies on the grammatical system of Singapore English have attributed little attention to the interactions between negation and quantification, and even less researched in previous studies is the application of the Aristotelian Square of Oppositions to variational data from international dialects of English. The present study takes up the challenge of explaining three phenomena relating to negation and quantification in Singapore English; (i) the somewhat more frequent use of affirmative universal quantifiers co-occurring with predicate negation; (ii) the presence of conjunctive phrasal coordinators (and) rather than disjunctive or in the scope of negation, and (iii) the use of the additive focus adverb (also) co-occurring with clause-mate negation, rather than the negatively-polarized clause-final (either). The present study investigates the possible existence of interrelations existing between each feature.
Published online: 31 May 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.183.08zie
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