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Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Edited by Antje Dammel and Oliver Schallert
[Studies in Language Companion Series 207] 2019
► pp. 243–282

Negative concord in Alemannic

An OT-approach at the syntax-morphology interface

| LMU Munich

The article focuses on variation in negative concord (NC) between and within the grammars of speakers of Alemannic. Based on a broad data set, partial grammars from individuals are extracted, and four different systems are attested: Grammar 1 with obligatory negative spread (N-spread), Grammar 2 with optional negative doubling (N-doubling), Grammar 3 with N-spread and N-doubling, and Grammar 4 without NC. My proposal in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) is based upon two assumptions: the generation of syntactic structures is unmarked in comparison to the generation of morphological structures (cf. Ackema & Neeleman 2001; Vogel 2006); weak indefinites and negative indefinites (n-indefinites) are not different lexemes, but only allomorphs (cf. Weiß 2002a).

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Metalinguistic comments in the dialectal literature
    • 2.2Spontaneous speech data
    • 2.3Questionnaire
    • 2.4Summary
  • 3.Towards an explanation of NC
    • 3.1The semantic and syntactic behavior of n-indefinites
    • 3.2The syntax of NC: General issues and two applications
    • 3.3Explaining NC in optimality theory (OT)
    • 3.4Summary
    • 3.5A side note on the classification of NC types
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.207.09mos
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