Cover not available

In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 35–51

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 3
French negative concord and discord

An experimental investigation of contextual and prosodic disambiguation

 | Rutgers University
 | Rutgers University
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.03dep
Abstract
Evidence that DN readings arise in solid NC languages more than previously thought (Déprez et al. 2015) underscore the importance of investigating the factors governing their emergence to deepen our understanding of Negative Concord. This paper examines the roles of context and prosody in disambiguating simple French transitive sentences with two NCIs (personne, rien) experimentally. French speakers were recorded reading target sentences with NCIs in NC or DN eliciting contexts followed by a verification statement judged as T/F and analyzed as context-matching or not. Context-matching targets were extracted using Praat and analyzed using ProsodyPro (Xu 2013). Sentence contour, average pitch and F0 peak value on NCIs were compared across conditions. Our results provide solid evidence that in French, context influence interpretation and NC and DN interpretations are prosodically distinguished.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Experimental background
  • 4.Experimental design
  • 5.Participants and procedure
  • 6.Analysis
  • 7.Results: Context influence
  • 8.Results: Acoustic analysis
  • 9.Discussion
  • 10.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (29)
References
Avanzi, Mathieu, George Christodoulides, and Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie. 2014. “Prosodic Phrasing of SVO Sentences in French.” In Social and Linguistic Speech Prosody. Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Speech Prosody, ed. by Nick Campbell, Dafydd Gibbon, and Daniel Hirst, 703–707. Dublin: Science Foundation Ireland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2015. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.07. Retrieved 30 May 2015 from [URL]
Corblin, Francis. 1996. “Multiple negation processing in natural language.” Theoria. A Swedish Journal of Philosophy 62 (3): 214–260.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corblin, Francis, Viviane Déprez, Henriette De Swart, and Lucia Tovena. 2004. “Negative Concord.” In Handbook of French semantics, ed. by Henriette De Swart and Corblin, 417–455. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corblin, Francis, and Lucia Tovena. 2003. “L’expression de la négation dans les langues romanes.” In Les langues romanes: Problèmes de la phrase simple, ed. by Daniele Godard, 281–343. Paris: CNRS Editions.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Swart, Henriette. 2010. Expressing and Interpreting Negation: An OT Typology. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Swart, Henriette, and Ivan A. Sag. 2002. “Negation and negative concord in Romance.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 373–417.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Déprez, Viviane. 2000. “Parallel (A)symmetries and the Internal Structure of Negative Expressions.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18 (2): 253–342.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. “On the structuring role of grammaticalized morpho-syntactic features.” In Proceeding of NELS 37, ed. by Emily Elfner, and Martin Walkow, 31–44. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord.” In The Evolution of Negation: Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, ed. by Pierre Larrivée, and Richard Ingham, 221–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “NC vs. DN: a macroparametric variation? What can an experimental investigation tell us?” Keynote paper presented at the Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages 44, University of Western Ontario.
Déprez, Viviane, Anne Cheylys, and Pierre Larrivée. 2013. “When and How is Concord preferred? An experimental approach.” In L’Interface langage-cognition The Language-cognition Interface. Actes du 19e Congrès International des Linguistes, Genève, 22–27 juillet 2013, ed. by Stephen R. Anderson, Jacques Moeschler, and Fabienne Reboul. Genève: Droz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Déprez, Viviane, Susagna Tubau, Anne Cheylus, and M. Teresa Espinal. 2015. “Double Negation in a Negative Concord language: An experimental investigation.” Lingua 163: 75–107.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Espinal, M. Teresa, and Pilar Prieto. 2011. “Intonational encoding of double negation in Catalan.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2392–2410.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Espinal, M. Teresa, Susagna Tubau, Joan Borràs-Comes, and Pilar Prieto. 2016. “Double negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction between syntax and prosody”. In Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives, ed. by Pierre Larrivée, and Chungmin Lee, 145–176. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Féry, Caroline. 2001. “Focus and Phrasing in French.” In Audiatur Vox Sapientiae. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow, ed. by Caroline Féry, and Wolfgang Sternefeld, 153–181. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fonville, Renata. 2013. “The role of intonation in the use of double negatives in Dutch.” Master’s thesis, Utrecht University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2000. “Negative … concord.” Natural language and linguistic theory 18: 457–523.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldman, Jean-Philippe. 2011. “EasyAlign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat.” In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2011 (InterSpeech 2011), 3240–3242. Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 1995. The syntax of negation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herburger, Elena. 2001. “The negative concord puzzle revisited.” Natural Language Semantics 9: 289–333.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huddlestone, Kathleen M. 2010. “Negative Indefinites in Afrikaans.” Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
May, Robert. 1990. “A note on quantifier absorption.” The Linguistic Review 7: 121–127.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mertens, Piet. To appear. “The Prosogram model for pitch stylization and its applications in intonation transcription.” In Prosodic Theory and Practice, ed. by Jonathan A. Barnes, and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Puskás, Genoveva. 2012. “Licensing double negation in NC and non-NC languages.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30: 611–649.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Watanabe, Akira. 2004. “The genesis of negative concord: Syntax and morphology of negative doubling.” Linguistic Inquiry 35 (4): 559–612.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xu, Yi. 2013. “ProsodyPro – A Tool for Large-scale Systematic Prosody Analysis.” In Proceedings of Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody (TRASP 2013), ed. by Brigitte Bigi, and Daniel Hirst, 7–10. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zanuttini, Rafaella. 1991. “Syntactic properties of sentential negation.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. “Sentential Negation and Negative Concord.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Rotter, Stephanie & Mingya Liu
2025. A register approach to negative concord versus negative polarity items in English. Linguistics 63:3 ► pp. 577 ff. DOI logo
Etxeberria, Urtzi, M.Teresa Espinal & Susagna Tubau
2024. Establishing the limits between polarity sensitivity, negative polarity and negative concord. Linguistic Typology 28:2 ► pp. 331 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
Déprez, Viviane
2018. What is negative in Haitian Creole? Negative Concord Items, sentential, constituent and expletive negation. In Negation and Negative Concord [Contact Language Library, 55], ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue