Postverbal negation: Typology, diachrony, areality

Diachrony; Existential negation; Givón Cycle; Jespersen Cycle; Language contact; Negative Existential Cycle; Negative verb; Postverbal negation; Prohibitive negation; Standard negation; Typology; Language and Linguistics; Communication; Linguistics and Language

Abstract :

[en] The paper sketches the state of affairs of our understanding of postverbal negation. It departs from the typological finding that there is a cross-linguistic preference for a negator to precede the verb. Nevertheless, a sizable proportion of the world’s languages adhere to a pattern with a negator following the verb, and such negators are typically morphologically bound. The existence of this pattern, unfavorable from a functional perspective, calls for a diachronic explanation. The paper takes stock of diachronic processes that can lead to postverbal negation, in general, and suffixal negation, in particular. Furthermore, a language may acquire a pattern with postverbal negation through language contact, and this is yet another perspective that the paper addresses. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this volume, highlighting the new insights.

Disciplines :

Languages & linguistics

Author, co-author :

Krasnoukhova, Olga ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de langues modernes : linguistique, littérature et traduction > Linguistique synchronique anglaise ; Leiden University ; University of Antwerp

van der Auwera, Johan; University of Antwerp

Crevels, Mily; Leiden University

Language :

English

Title :

Postverbal negation: Typology, diachrony, areality

Publication date :

05 November 2021

Journal title :

Studies in Language

ISSN :

0378-4177

eISSN :

1569-9978

Publisher :

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

499 - 519

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

http://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/sl.00020.int.pdf

Funding text :

This study was made possible by the Research Foundation Flanders, whose financial support is gratefully acknowledged: grant No G024117N awarded to Johan van der Auwera. Olga Krasnoukhova would like to acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895548, made use of when finalizing the present paper.

Available on ORBi :

since 07 October 2024

Statistics

Number of views

17 (0 by ULiège)

Number of downloads

0 (0 by ULiège)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenCitations

OpenAlex citations

publications

supporting

mentioning

contrasting

Smart Citations

Citing PublicationsSupportingMentioningContrasting

View Citations

See how this article has been cited at scite.ai

scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.

Bibliography

Alves, Flávia de Castro. 2004. O Timbira falado pelos Canela Apãniekrá: Uma contribução aos estudos da morfossintaxe de uma língua Jê. Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas PhD dissertation.
Alves, Flávia de Castro. 2010. Evolution of alignment in Timbira. International Journal of American Linguistics 76(4). 439–475. https://doi.org/10.1086/658054
Bickel, Balthasar. 2013. Distributional biases in language families. In Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson & Alan Timberlake (eds.), Language typology and historical contingency, 415–444. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.104.19bic
Bybee, Joan, William Pagliuca & Revere D. Perkins. 1990. On the asymmetries in the affixation of grammatical material. In William Croft, Keith Denning & Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), Studies in typology and diachrony: Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday, 1–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.20.04byb
Christmas, Raymond B. & J. Elisabeth Christmas. 1973a. Clause patterns in Kupia. In Ronald L. Trail (ed.), Patterns in clause, sentence, and discourse in selected languages of India and Nepal, Part 2: Clause (Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 41), 257–343. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics & University of Oklahoma.
Christmas, Raymond B. & J. Elisabeth Christmas. 1973b. Kupia texts. In Ronald L. Trail (ed.), Patterns in clause, sentence, and discourse in selected languages of India and Nepal, Part 3: Texts (Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 41), 3–108. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Costa, Lucivaldo Silva da. 2015. Uma descrição gramatical da língua Xikrín do Cateté (família Jê, tronco Macro-Jê). Brasilia: Universidade de Brasília PhD dissertation. https://doi.org/10.26512/2015.06.T.20098
Croft, William. 1991. The evolution of negation. Journal of Linguistics 27. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700012391
Crowley, Terry. 2002. Port Sandwich. In John Lynch, Malcolm Ross & Terry Crowley (eds.), The Oceanic languages, 650–659. Richmond: Curzon.
Crowley, Terry. 2006. The Avava language of Central Malakula (Vanuatu) (Pacific Linguistics 574), edited by John Lynch. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Cutler, Anne, John A. Hawkins & Garry Gilligan. 1985. The suffixing preference: A processing explanation. Linguistics 23. 723–758. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1985.23.5.723
Dahl, Östen. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17. 79–106. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1979.17.1‑2.79
Dahl, Östen. 2010. Typology of negation. In Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The expression of negation, 9–38. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dourado, Luciana Gonçalves. 2001. Aspectos morfossintáticos da língua Panará (Jê). Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas PhD dissertation.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1988. Universals of negative position. In Michael Hammond, Edith A. Moravcsik & Jessica R. Wirth (eds.), Studies in syntactic typology (Typological Studies in Language 17), 93–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.17.10dry
Dryer, Matthew S. 2009. Negation patterns in West African languages and beyond. In Norbert Cyffer, Erwin Ebermann & Georg Ziegelmeyer (eds.), Verb-object-negative order in Central Africa (Typological Studies in Language 87), 307–362. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.87.15dry
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013a. Order of negative morpheme and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/143 (last access 9 June 2021).
Dryer, Matthew S. 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. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/144 (last access 9 June 2021).
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013c. Prefixing vs. suffixing in inflectional morphology. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/26 (last access 9 June 2021).
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013d. Negative morphemes. In Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info/chapter/112 (last access 9 June 2021).
Fricke, Hanna. 2019. Traces of language contact: The Flores-Lembata languages in eastern Indonesia (LOT Dissertation Series 544). Utrecht: LOT.
Gildea, Spike & Sérgio Meira. 2016. A comparative survey of verbal negation in the Cariban family. Paper presented at Amazonicas VI, Leticia, May 23–28.
Givón, T. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: An archaeologist’s field trip. CLS 7(1). 394–415.
Givón, T. 1973. The Time-Axis Phenomenon. Language 49. 890–925. https://doi.org/10.2307/412067
Givón, T. 1978. Negation in language: Pragmatics, function, ontology. In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 9 (Pragmatics), 69–112. New York: Academic Press.
Givón, T. 2001. Syntax: An Introduction, Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.https://doi.org/10.1075/z.syn1
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. Order of affixing: a study in general linguistics. Essays in linguistics, 86–94. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Güldemann, Tom. 2007. The Macro-Sudan belt: Towards identifying a linguistic area in northern sub-Saharan Africa. In Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse (eds.), A linguistic geography of Africa, 151–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 2001 [1989]. A natural history of negation, 2nd edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2012. Clause-final negative markers in southeastern Bamana dialects: A contact-induced evolution. Africana Linguistica 18. 169–192. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2012.1009
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2015. Clause-final negative markers in Bobo and Samogo: Parallel evolution and contact. Journal of Historical Linguistics 5(2). 235–266. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.5.2.02idi
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2018. An areal typology of clause-final negation in Africa: Language dynamics in space and time. In Daniël Van Olmen, Tanja Mortelmans & Frank Brisard (eds.), Aspects of linguistic variation, 115–163. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Kopenhagen: Høst.
Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery. 2010. Reconstrução fonológica e lexical do Proto-Jê Meridional. Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas MA thesis.
Klamer, Marian, Ger P. Reesink & Miriam van Staden. 2008. East Nusantara as a linguistic area. In Pieter Muysken (ed.), From linguistic areas to areal linguistics, 95–149. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.90.03kla
Krasnoukhova, Olga & Johan van der Auwera. 2021. South American postverbal standard negation. Manuscript, under revision. (Submitted).
Lafkioui, Mena B. 2013. Reinventing negation patterns in Moroccan Arabic. In Mena B. Lafkioui (ed.), African Arabic: Approaches to dialectology (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 258), 51–94. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110292343.51
Lafkioui, Mena B. & Vermondo Brugnatelli. 2020. Negation in Berber: Variation, evolution, and typology. Linguistics 58(4). 967–1008. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling‑2020‑0010
Langdon, Margaret. 1970. A grammar of Diegueño: The Mesa Grande dialect. (University of California Publications in Linguistics 66.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Meillet, Antoine. 1912. L’évolution des formes grammaticales. Scientia 12. 384–400. (Reprinted in Meillet, Antoine. 1921. Linguistique historique et linguistique générale. 130–148. Paris: H. Champion.)
Miestamo, Matti. 2005. Standard negation. The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Miranda, Maxwell. 2015. Negação em Krahô (família Jê) em uma perspectiva comparative [Negation in Krahô (Jê family) in a comparative perspective]. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica 7. 245–274. https://doi.org/10.26512/rbla.v7i2.20599
Munro, Pamela. 1973. Reanalysis and elaboration in Yuman negatives. Linguistic Notes from la Jolla 5. 36–62.
Munro, Pamela. 1974. Topics in Mojave syntax. San Diego, CA: University of California PhD dissertation.
Munro, Pamela. 1976. Subject copying, auxiliarization and predicate raising: The Mojave evidence. International Journal of American Linguistics 42(2). 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1086/465398
Munro, Pamela. 1977. From existential to copula: The history of Yuman be. In Charles Li (ed.), Mechanisms of syntactic change, 445–490. New York: Academic Press.
Muysken, Pieter, Harald Hammarström, Joshua Birchall, Swintha Danielsen, Love Eriksen, Ana Vilacy Galucio, Rik van Gijn, Simon van de Kerke, Vishnupraya Kolipakam, Olga Krasnoukhova, Neele Müller & Loretta O’Connor. 2014. The languages of South America: Deep families, areal relationships, and language contact. In Loretta O’Connor & Pieter Muysken (eds.), The native languages of South America: Origins, development, typology, 299–322. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nikulin, Andrey. 2020. Proto-Macro-Jê: Um estado reconstrutivo. Brasilia: Universidade de Brasília PhD dissertation.
Nikulin, Andrey & Mário André Coelho da Silva. 2020. As línguas Maxakalí e Krenák dentro do tronco Macro-Jê. Cadernos de Etnolingüística 8(1). 1–64.
Payne, John R. 1985. Negation. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Volume 1: Clause structure, 197–242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, Glanville. 1962. The negative particles pas, mie, and point in French. Archivum Linguisticum 14. 14–34.
Price, Glanville. 1971. The French language: Present and past. London: Edward Arnold.
Reesink, Ger. 2002. Clause-final negation: Structure and interpretation. Functions of Language 9(2). 239–268. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.9.2.06ree
Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail. 2012. A grammar of Karajá. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago PhD dissertation.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt Brace and World.
Schapper, Antoinette. 2015. Wallacea, a linguistic area. Archipel 90. 99–151. https://doi.org/10.4000/archipel.371
Thackston, Wheeler M. 2006. Kurmanji Kurdish: A reference grammar with selected readings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
van Alsenoy, Lauren. 2014. A new typology of indefinite pronouns, with a focus on negative indefinites. Antwerp: University of Antwerp PhD dissertation.
van der Auwera, Johan. 2009. The Jespersen Cycles. In Elly van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical change, 35–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.146.05auw
van der Auwera, Johan & Olga Krasnoukhova. 2020. The typology of negation. In Viviane Déprez & M. Teresa Espinal (eds.), The Oxford handbook of negation, 91–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van der Auwera, Johan & Olga Krasnoukhova. (forthc.) Revisiting postverbal standard negation in the Jê languages. To appear in: Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas.
van der Auwera, Johan, Olga Krasnoukhova & Frens Vossen. In print. Intertwining the negative cycles. In Ljuba Veselinova & Arja Hamari (eds.), The Negative Existential Cycle from a historical-comparative perspective. Berlin: Language Science Press.
van der Auwera, Johan, Daniël Van Olmen & Frens Vossen (forthc.) Negation. In K. Alexander Adelaar & Antoinette Schapper (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The linguistic cycle: Language change and the language faculty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199756056.001.0001
van Gelderen, Elly. In print. The Negative Existential and Other Cycles: Jespersen, Givón, and the Copula Cycle. In Ljuba Veselinova & Arja Hamari (eds.) The Negative Existential Cycle from a historical-comparative perspective. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Van Olmen, Daniel. 2010. Typology meets usage: The case of the prohibitive infinitive in Dutch. Folia Linguistica 44(2). 471–508. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2010.017
Verkerk, Annemarie & Shahar Shirtz. In print. Negative existentials in Indo-European: A typological and diachronic overview. In Ljuba Veselinova & Arja Hamari (eds.), The Negative Existential Cycle from a historical-comparative perspective. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Veselinova, Ljuba. 2014. The negative existential cycle revisited. Linguistics 52(6). 1327–1369. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling‑2014‑0021
Veselinova, Ljuba & Arja Hamari (eds.). In print. The Negative Existential Cycle from a historical-comparative perspective. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Vossen, Frens & Johan van der Auwera. 2014. The Jespersen cycles seen from Austronesian. In Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jaqueline Visconti (eds.), The diachrony of negation, 47–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.160.03vos
Vossen, Frens. 2016. Towards a typology of the Jespersen Cycles. Antwerp: University of Antwerp PhD dissertation.

Similar publications

Sorry the service is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later.