Natural Syntax: Negation in English

• Authors: Janez Orešnik
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Natural Syntax is a developing deductive theory, a branch of Naturalness Theory. The naturalness judgements are couched in naturalness scales, which follow from the basic parameters (or "axioms") listed at the beginning of the paper. The predictions of the theory are calculated in "deductions", whose chief components are a pair of naturalness scales and the rules governing the alignment of corresponding naturalness values. Parallel and chiastic alignments are distinguished, in complementary distribution. Here almost only chiastic alignment is utilized, the latter being mandatory in derivations limited to unnatural environments. (This paper deals with negation, a phenomenon of low naturalness in Natural Syntax.)The exemplification is taken from English. The following pairs of variants are dealt with in deductions: (1) Is there somebody else? vs. Is there nobody else? (2) Nobody vs. nothing. (3) She is not lazy vs. She does not like ice cream. (4) Absence vs. presence of not with no and any. (5) The adverb nowhere clause-initially and clause-internally. (6) Nowhere expressing rest and movement. (7) Pronouns with no- used as subject or object vs. pronouns with any- used as object. (8) Not with finite and non-finite verbs. (9) He hadn't vs. he didn't have. (10) The adverb never in situ and ex situ. (11) No money vs. not any money in conversation. (12) The determiner no vs. the pronoun none.

Keywords

EN

naturalness; syntax; morphosyntax; English; negation

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 97-111

Dates

published

2007-08-01

online

2007-08-07

Contributors

author

Janez Orešnik

• University of Ljubljana

References

• Collins Cobuild English Grammar. 1990. London: HarperCollins.
• Dahl, Ö. 1979. "Typology of sentence negation". Linguistics 17. 79-106.
• Fenk-Oczlon, G. 1991. "Frequenz und Kognition - Frequenz und Markiertheit". Folia Linguistica 25. 361-94.
• Havers, W. 1931. Handbuch der erklärenden Syntax. Heidelberg: Winter.
• Kilani-Schoch, M. and W.U. Dressler. 2005. Morphologie naturelle et flexion du verbe français. Tübingen: Narr.
• Mayerthaler, W. 1981. Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion.
• Mayerthaler, W., G. Fliedl and C. Winkler. 1998. Lexikon der natürlichkeitstheoretischen Syntax und Morphosyntax. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10010-007-0005-4