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Two negations for the price of one

Paper · 2016 · Rosalind Thornton, Anna Notley, Vincenzo Moscati et al.

Summary

The paper asks whether children learning Standard English start out with a grammar that allows negative concord (NC), where two negative elements express a single negation, even though adult Standard English is usually described as a double negation (DN) language in which two negatives cancel. The question is motivated by Zeijlstra's (2004) typological generalization: languages whose negative marker is a syntactic head show NC. English n't is often analysed as such a head, which makes English look like an exception. The authors ran a comprehension experiment with 20 children aged 3–5 and 15 adult controls. Sentences containing sentential negation plus an n-word such as nothing were presented in contexts that fit either reading. Adults mostly chose DN, while children mostly chose NC. This supports the idea that NC may initially belong to the core grammar of English. It also challenges purely usage-based accounts, because children produced an interpretation absent from adult input. The authors propose that hearing negative words like nothing in object position, with no second negation, is the evidence that pushes learners toward DN.

Key points

  • Participants were 20 English-acquiring children (3–5 years) and 15 adults. Each test sentence appeared in a context compatible with both a DN and an NC reading.
  • Adults gave the DN reading most of the time, and children gave the NC reading most of the time.
  • Zeijlstra (2004) surveyed 25 languages and found that whenever a language's negator functions as a head in the syntax, that language has NC. The generalization is one-directional: some NC languages, such as Quebecois and Bavarian, have only an adverbial negator. Zeijlstra later recast it as a binary parameter, with NegP and [i/uNEG] features on the NC side and a vP-adjoined adverb on the DN side.
  • In Standard English, DN typically has a corrective, metalinguistic role. Examples are cases like Lenny does not like nothing answering Lenny likes nothing, and DN usually comes with stress on the auxiliary and the n-word. Many dialects allow NC alongside DN, including African American English, Appalachian English, Belfast English and Bristol English.
  • Control sentences also contained two negations, but one sat inside a relative clause on the subject, so the two did not interact. Children and adults patterned alike on these, which argues against a processing-limitation explanation.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Present each critical sentence in a context where both readings are equally true, so the choice reveals which interpretation the grammar supplies. This avoids context forcing the answer.
  • I2. Add structurally matched controls with the same number of negations, where the negations sit in separate clauses and cannot cancel. A difference on critical items but not controls then points to grammar, not overload.
  • I3. An n-word like nothing may either carry its own negation or merely agree with a preceding n't. Corrective context and stress are the cues that select the cancelling reading.
  • I4. The uniqueness assumption says a learner should keep one meaning per structure unless the input clearly shows more. This serves as a substitute for negative evidence when pruning an overgeneral grammar.
  • I5. A single unambiguous trigger can tell the learner which system it is in: an object n-word that negates on its own, with no other negator, signals a DN language.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (answer): Build reader test items where a passage supports two readings of a negated question, to check which polarity reading Mova actually computes rather than guesses from context.
  • I2 (learn): Pair every hard-construction evaluation with such near-twin negative controls, so a gain or drop can be attributed to the targeted phenomenon rather than general parser noise.
  • I3 (frames): Treat "didn't X nothing" as underdetermined polarity in the frame, resolving to DN only when a prior utterance is being corrected and defaulting to NC in dialectal or quoted speech.
  • I4 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could prefer one reading per construction and allow a second only when silver data from several witness parsers repeatedly attests it.
  • I5 (tokens): Mark n-words lexically with a feature for "can stand alone as negation", so later stages can count polarity correctly in sentences like "she saw nothing".

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Macquarie UniversitySydney · Australia17 works · 4,827 citations🎓University of SienaSiena · Italy4 works · 187 citations🔬ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its DisordersSydney · Australia2 works · 182 citations

Also on the byline: Australian Research Council.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

Cite

Cite as Rosalind Thornton, Anna Notley, Vincenzo Moscati and Stephen Crain. 2016. Two negations for the price of one. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.4

@article{thornton2016two,
  title = {{Two negations for the price of one}},
  author = {Rosalind Thornton, Anna Notley, Vincenzo Moscati and Stephen Crain},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.4}
}

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  48. How to cite this article: Thornton, Rosalind, Anna Notley, Vincenzo Moscati and Stephen Crain. 2016. Two negations for the price of one. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1): 45. 1–30, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.4 ↗
  49. Published: 08 November 2016 find
  50. Copyright: © 2016 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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