Larrivee.2014.Markedness of Double Negation-

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It is universally assumed that the Double Negation interpretation by which two negative markers cancel their value to yield a positive inter-pretation is marked (i.a. Corblin and Tovena 2001, Espinal and Prieto2011, Horn 2001, Huddlestone 2010, Moscati 2006, Puskas 2012,Swart 2010, Zeijlstra 2004). This is allegedly the case in so-called Nega-tive Concord languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, where theconcord relation would be the default interpretation for multiple nega-tive expressions sharing the same structural clausal scope. Even whereconcord relations are believed to be disallowed as in standard English,

Dutch and German, Double Negation interpretation of sequences suchas (1) and (2) would continue to be marked.

(1) Nobody is Òdoing nothingÓ.(2) John is not doing nothing.

Markedness is generally interpreted in terms of formal and semanticcomplexity, lower frequency, and greater processing costs. More lin-guistic marking is needed for DN in terms of prosodic and syntacticcues (Espinal and Prieto 2011, Horn 2001, Puskas 2012). Lesser fre-quency is documented by Huddlestone (2010: 140) who finds 4% of

Double Negation for clauses with multiple n-words in Afrikaans.Greater processing costs are assumed on the basis that triple negationis virtually unattested (Corblin 1996).

One potential explanation for DN markedness is that it in- volves a specific informational partition where one negative sequenceis discourse-old and rejected by a discourse-new negative, as suggested



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by various observations and from PuskasÕ work (2012, 2009, 2006).However, in fact, except for quantitative data from Huddlestone on

Afrikaans, little empirical support has been established for the idea ofDN markedness, or that its markedness is a consequence of Infor-mation Structure partitioning. Such evidence is what this paper pro-

vides, by analysing data from actual usage. Corpora are searched forconfigurations with multiple clause-mate negatives in French and inEnglish, respectively NC and DN languages. The analysis of the datafocuses on the preponderance of NC and DN readings and the role oftriggers such as Information Structure, to establish the markedness ofDN.

The study is presented as follows. First, I spell-out the assump-tions of Double Negation markedness and the reasons to believe thatsuch markedness relates to Information Structure partitioning. I thenpresent the method to test these assumptions and analyse the Frenchand English corpus data by looking at the relative weight of the DNreading and its relation to Information Structure. The consequences ofthese data for the understanding of Double Negation and for its cogni-tive foundation are articulated in the concluding discussion.

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All natural languages are found to express negation. Multiple negativeexpressions sharing the same clausal scope entertain two possible typesof dependencies. One is Negative Concord, by which each of these ex-pressions contributes to the overall negative interpretation of theproposition. The other is Double Negation, where each negative can-cels the other out to imply a positive proposition. Both are illustratedby the following French example:

(3) Personne ne fait rien.

ÒNobody is doing anythingÓ (NC)ÒNobody is doing nothingÓ, i.e. Everyone is doing something (DN)

(3) can be interpreted with a Negative Concord reading, where no ac-tion is taking place. This can be paraphrased by the second negativebeing replaced by a negative polarity item.



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(4) Personne ne fait quoi que ce soit.ÒNobody is doing anythingÓ

The example can also have a Double Negation interpretation, such thatsome action is indeed taking place. This can be disambiguated bystrong focus on one of the negatives, cleft structures and ques-tion/answer pairs.

(5) a. Personne ne fait rien .ÒNobody is doing nothingÓ, i.e. Everyone is doing some-

thing (DN)(6) a. Il nÕy a personne qui ne fait rien.

ÒThere is nobody who is doing nothingÓ,i.e. Everyone is doing something (DN)

(7) a. Ð Qui ne fait rien ? Ð Mais personne.ÒÐWho is doing nothing?

Ð Noone is.Ó i.e. Everybody is doing something (DN)

By contrast, only one interpretation is believed to be allowed by theFrench equivalent of (2).

(8) Jean ne fait pas rien.* ÒJean isnÕt doing anythingÓ (NC)ÒJean isnÕt doing nothingÓ, i.e. Jean is doing something (DN)

The co-occurrence of clausal negator pas ÔnotÕ with a n-word like rienÔnothingÕ and personne ÔnobodyÕ is assumed to exclude Negative Con-cord interpretations in European French ( inter alia Biberauer and Rob-erts 2011, Corblin and Tovena 2001, DŽprez 2000: 261, Giannakidou2007: 350, Muller 1984: 64-65, Rowlett 1998: 143ss, de Swart 2010:156). No paraphrase could therefore be expressed by replacing the n-

word with a NPI.

(9) Jean ne fait pas quoi que ce soit.ÒJean is not doing anythingÓ (NC)

Paraphrase is rather found in the diagnostics of DN that are strong fo-cus on one of the negatives, cleft structures and question/answer pairs.



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(5) b. Jean ne fait pas rien .ÒJean isnÕt doing for nothing Ó, i.e. Jean is doing something

(DN) (6) b. Il nÕy a rien que Jean ne fait pas.

ÒThere is nothing that Jean isnÕt doing.Ó,i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)

(7) b. Ð QuÕest-ce que Jean ne fait pas ? Ð Rien du tout.ÒÐ What is John not doing?

Ð Nothing at all.Ó, i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)

Double Negation is the interpretation that also obtains when the samescope is not shared by negative expressions (LarrivŽe 2004: 169 i.a.), asin the following where a clausal negation pas and personne cancel out thelocal morphological and constituent scope negative.

(10) Personne ne sÕinquite pour rien.* ÒNobody worries for any reasonÓ (NC)ÒNobody worries for no reasonÓ,i.e. Everyone worries for a reason (DN)

(11) Ce nÕest pas impossible.* ÒItÕs impossibleÓ (NC)ÒItÕs not impossibleÓ, i.e. ItÕs possible (DN)

For ambiguous sentences with multiple negative expressionssharing the same clausal scope as in French (3), Negative Concord ap-pears to be the default interpretation. Markedness is universally be-lieved to characterise the DN interpretation, as demonstrated by thefollowing citations:

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Claims of DN markedness rely on four types of arguments, having todo with formal complexity, interpretation, preponderance and triggers.

First, the DN interpretation typically requires more markingthan its positive equivalent: two negators are involved in (2) and nonein John did something .

That formal complexity makes DN fall under the Gricean max-im of manner according to which an unexpected way to put thingsleads the hearer to search for an unexpected interpretation (or follow-ing Levinson 2000Õs M-principle, Òwhat is said in an abnormal way in-dicates an abnormal situationÓ). And indeed, the DN interpretation issemantically complex in that it is not straightforwardly identical to itspositive logical correspondent. In his extensive discussion of casessuch as (10), Horn (2001: 296-308) shows that a statement such as ItÕs

not impossible that Bill is lying is a more attenuated judgment than ItÕs possible that Bill is lying . This is unexpected under logical analysis for whichÒa proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negationÓ (Russelland Whitehead 1952: 117), and suggests that DN is a marked interpre-tation in natural languages.

Third, it has been noted that in corpora, DN readings are com-paratively rarer than NC: Huddlestone cites 4% of multiple n-words



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clauses such as (1) and (2) with DN readings in her Afrikaans corpus(2010: 140). This supports the claim in the citations above that DN isindeed rare, and therefore more marked than NC interpretation.

Finally, and a possible explanation of the third point, DN re-quires explicit contextual triggers in a way that NC does not, maybebecause it is harder to process as suggested by Francis Corblin (i.a.1996). A major trigger of DN is accentual focus (Corblin 1996, DŽprez2000, Espinal and Prieto 2011, Falaus 2007a,b, LarrivŽe 2004: 162-165,Puskas 2012, 2009, 2006). Focus may be realised by various prosodicfactors such as pause, duration, intonation contour and pitch range(Krahmer, Swerts, Theune and Weegels 2002), and may be supportedby gestural elements (Prieto, Borrˆs-Comes, Tubau and Espinal 2013).

The contradiction contour is demonstrated through perception exper-iments to be a key factor in bringing about Double Negation interpre-tation by Espinal and Prieto (2011) and by Espinal, Tubau, Borrˆs-Comes and Prieto (this volume). This seems intuitively correct. Asmentioned, the DN reading of (5a) calls for focus on one of the n-

words:

(5) a. Personne ne fait rien

and without such focus the sequence is most likely to be interpreted asNC. Focus on one of the n-words similarly tends to yield DN in theEnglish equivalent:

(1) Nobody is Òdoing nothingÓ.

Converging evidence is thus relating double negation and focus. Triggers of DN include structural factors. A list of such factors

is provided by Corblin, DŽprez, de Swart and Tovena (2004), andcomprises question/answer configuration , modification of the n-wordby the equivalent of almost , use of a n-word determiner, and use of n-

word with a clausal negator. Question/answer pairs as (7) are said toonly have a DN reading, although NC is possible in Catalan as per Es-pinal and Prieto (2011). Likewise, it is suggested that modification by

presque promotes DN as in (12),

(12) Personne nÕa presque rien fait.ÒNobody did almost nothingÓ



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although again this is noted to allow NC in Catalan (Corblin, DŽprez,de Swart and Tovena 2004: 430), a reading also available for (12) asrecognised by the authors and as attested in LarrivŽe (2004: 167). De-terminer n-words would favour DN, which would be the only readingof the following example:

(13) Aucun enfant nÕa mangŽ aucun g‰teau. (Corblin, DŽprez, deSwart and Tovena 2004: 425)ÒNo child ate no piece of cakeÓ

Configurations such as (13) are however again attested with a NC in-terpretation (LarrivŽe 2004: 168; see also the discussion by Muller2005). Finally, the use of a n-word with a clausal negative as in (2) and(8) would support DN (Corblin, DŽprez, de Swart and Tovena 2004:420; see also Jespersen 1917: 62ff, Payne 1985: 204). While that is truein one register of European French, many stylistic and regional varie-ties allow NC for this configuration. The proposed structural triggersof DN thus at best contribute to a DN reading rather than define it.

A better trigger than structural factors therefore seems to befound in prosodic focus. However, prosodic factors are not categorical,as shown by results in Espinal and Prieto (2011) and Espinal, Tubau,Borrˆs-Comes and Prieto (this volume), who submit a perception testto Catalan speakers who are asked to identify the reading of ques-tion/answer configurations of the type ÒÐWho didnÕt eat dessert? ÐNoone.Ó. Unlike English and French, the configuration is ambiguous inCatalan between NC and DN, but is expected to be DN when the an-swer n-word is bearing a contradictory contour. Even in the maximallyfavourable DN context of a negative answer bearing a contradictorycontour to a negative question, there are still 32% of subjects whoidentified a NC reading. These maximally favourable environments ofquestion-answer and contradictory contour both relate to InformationStructure (IS). IS concerns the status of the information conveyed bylinguistic material in relation to being accessible to the hearer at thatpoint of the discourse (for essential references on this, see Prince 1981,Gundel and Fretheim 1993, Krifka 2007). Accessible information isdiscourse-old, it has been mentioned before, and information that hasnot been mentioned or cannot be accommodated or inferred as such is



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discourse-new. The answer to a question as in (7) thus has discourse-new status with the rest of the proposition being discourse-old.

(7) a. Ð Qui ne fait rien ? Ð Mais personne.ÒÐWho is doing nothing?

Ð Noone is.Ó i.e. Everybody is doing something (DN)(7) b. Ð QuÕest-ce que Jean ne fait pas ?

Ð Rien du tout.ÒÐ What is John not doing?

Ð Nothing at all.Ó, i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)

The partition between a discourse-new negative answer to a discourse-old negative question yielding DN suggest the determining role of IS.Further indications as to the role of IS are also found by Moscati(2006: 136ff). His study of negative scope in Italian reports that a n-

word in a preverbal focus position brings about DN in a language where normally only one preverbal marker is needed for clausal nega-tion.

(14) Nessuno non ha capito il problema.ÒNobody didnÕt understand the problemÓ, i.e. Everybody under-

stood it (DN)

The same observation holds for languages with similar structures, suchas Spanish and Sardinian, with the exception again of Catalan. DN isproduced by a n-word in focus position of an otherwise negative sen-tence, and material in focus is by definition discourse-new (see refer-ences and discussion in Chen, Li and Yang 2012), with the rest of theproposition being discourse-old, confirming the relation between In-formation Structure and Double Negation interpretation.

IS thus seems to be the level at which DN readings are defined.If correct, this would explain why neither syntactic nor prosodic fac-tors are absolutely determinant. It would also account for the fact thatDN is marked as it would associate to a particular configuration withone negative being discourse-new and the other discourse-old along

with the rest of the clause. The defining role of IS for DN readings is explored by Puskas

(2012, 2009, 2006). Within a Minimalist perspective, she considers cas-



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es such as Personne ne fait rien (3) and Jean ne fait pas rien (8). (8) yields aDouble Negation interpretation as a matter of course in normative reg-isters of European French. This associates to strong accentual focus on

pas in the contexts where it is denied that Jean does nothing (the case where it is the n-word that is focused is not considered). (3) may yield aDouble Negation interpretation, although this need not be the case.

Again, strong accentual focus comes to bear on the negative that re-jects the negative proposition, and focus on personne in (3) communi-cates the denial that someone is doing nothing. This would followfrom the focused item in (3) and (8) being raised in a Verum Focus po-sition to take scope over the whole negative proposition, leading tonegative values cancelling out. (The fact that the n-word is not negativein itself according to Puskas forces her in cases like (3) to make the

Verum Focus the recipient of the second negative value to ensure can-cellation, these theory-internal considerations being orthogonal to ourconcerns.) The structure is reminiscent of metalinguistic negation, ra-ther than recursive quantification, as indicated by the H*L prosody alsofound with presupposition denial. A second mechanism relating to aweak DN is proposed (Puskas 2012) on the basis of the Hungarian data

where the clausal negative like pas or the n-word is a Contrastive Fo-cus. The difference would be expressed by the type of focus and into-nation, the syntactic position of the second negative which would becovert in most cases and languages, and the type of alternatives in-

volved (polar reading for strong DN induced by Verum Focus vs. non-exclusive alternatives induced by contrastive topic for weak DN).

Whatever the necessity of weak and strong Double Negation might be,the analysis does articulate the relation between DN and IS.

Converging indications support the view that Double Negationis the result of Information Structure configurations, where the reject-ed negative proposition is discourse-old and the rejecting negator isdiscourse-new. To illustrate, the sequence John is not doing nothing with aDN reading paraphrased by It is not the case that John is doing nothing

would divide into a discourse-old negative proposition John is doing nothing rejected by a discourse-new not . The fact that it would rely on a spe-cific IS configuration would make DN a marked negative dependency

with respect to NC that does not require such a configuration. Clearly,these proposals need to be put to the empirical test. More must beknown about the relations between IS and DN in actual usage, and

whether indeed DN is marked. A protocol for the study of DN in real



XX

usage is proposed in the next section, which also presents the researchresults before their significance is discussed in the final section.

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This study is concerned with empirically testing the assumptions thatDN is a marked interpretation, and that markedness arises from a spe-cific IS configuration. These assumptions can be tested in a variety of

ways, and are here verified by a study of actual usage. This choice is

motivated by the fact that usage study provides us with an understand-ing of the patterns of phenomena. Such an understanding is particular-ly important for a phenomenon on the triggers of which so little is ac-tually known, as evidenced by incompletely accurate claims made byexisting studies evoked above. The importance is furthered by the factthat it is usage that is the input for acquisition and that it is thereforecrucial for the cognitive status of a linguistic phenomenon.

The study of DN is conducted by looking at sequences inFrench, a Negative Concord language. DN should therefore be amarked option correlating to particular triggers, hypothesised to be anIS configuration on the basis of existing studies and available observa-

tions. IS is here defined as the status of information conveyed by lin-guistic material as to whether it is accessible to the hearer at that pointof the discourse (Dryer 1996, Schwenter 2005, LarrivŽe 2012). Becausethe impact of IS configuration on DN is what is tested, I select se-quences believed to be strongly biased in favour of DN. One such se-quence is (8), repeated below.

(8) Jean ne fait pas rien.* ÒJean isnÕt doing anythingÓ (NC)ÒJean isnÕt doing nothingÓ, i.e. Jean is doing something (DN)

Such sequences are generally believed to be DN in European French,and to exclude NC. The exact string ÒnÕa pas rienÓ Ône have-3PS-PR notnothingÕ was searched for in Google France pages, with the preverbalnegative clitic to exclude regional and register varieties where ne is mostoften absent and where NC is a possible reading. If DN is marked, it isexpected that even in favourable contexts, some NC cases could creepin, and that a proposition such as Il nÕa pas rien fait might in fact be in-



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terpreted as ÒHe didnÕt do anythingÓ some of the time. The other ex-pectation from DN markedness is that it should correlate to identifia-ble contextual triggers, with a dominant involvement of IS. More spe-cifically, the underlying negative proposition should be discourse-old inhaving been explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context, and the re-jecting negative to be discourse-new. To repeat, in (8), the proposition-al negative pas would be new information rejecting the discourse-oldnegative proposition Jean ne fait rien ÒJohn is doing nothingÓ, which

would be expected to have been mentioned explicitly before. Whilepreviously explicit usage is not the only diagnostic of discourse-old sta-tus, it is the most tangible manifestation, and therefore, given the noto-rious difficulties in identifying discourse status of propositional materi-al in actual usage, it is the one that we retain here.

The search for the string ÒnÕa pas rienÓ in March 2013 yielded445 hits. Each was extracted, and 74 irrelevant cases were excluded.

They concerned manifestly ungrammatical sentences (from e.g. auto-matic translation), productions from second-language speakers, repeat-ed pages, sequences with items belonging to different sentences orclauses, and cases of mention as opposed to usage. The 371 relevantoccurrences were analysed for their reading (NC or DN) and for theexplicit presence of the rejected negative proposition in the antecedentcontext.

Just over half the occurrences have a DN interpretation, with186, versus 185 with a NC reading. The NC reading relates to explicitactivation in 39 cases out of 185 (21%), as illustrated below.

(15) Eh, on est des Musulmans, on nÕa pas dÕ Èhommes saints È, ona pas de clergŽ, on nÕa pas rien de tout celaÉ(http:// www.yabiladi.com/É/fkih-d-un-douar-arrete-pour-2-4093862.html)ÒEh, weÕre Muslims, we donÕt have Ôholy menÕ, we donÕt have aclergy, we donÕt have nothing of the sort.Ó

where the proposition is introduced in oneÕs own speech. Althoughthis was not quantified, NC sequences seem to relate to emphatic nega-tion in a number of cases,

(16) a. mais si on nÕa pas rien re•u comme papier cest moncas et que les impots ne sont pas obliges de nous en-



X^

voyer un papier comment on fait pour savoir ce quÕilfaut payer ? (http://forum.aufeminin.com)Òbut if we havenÕt received nothing in terms of papersas is my case and the tax office doesnÕt have to send uspapers, how do we know what is to be paid ?Ó

b. Un reportage que la police avait bien sžr la possibilitŽde visionner et qui constituait la meilleure preuve de ceque notre reporter Žtait venu faire. Mais elle nÕa pasrien voulu entendre, ni voir.(http:// www.lavoixdesallobroges.org)ÒThe report that the police could see and that was thebest proof as to what our reporter was doing. But thepolice didnÕt want to hear or see nothing.Ó

NC readings seem particularly frequent with recurrent expressionssuch as nÕavoir pas rien sans rien (Ònot to have nothing without nothingÓ,49 cases), nÕavoir pas rien fait (Ònot to have done nothingÓ, 14), nÕavoir pasrien ˆ envier (Ònot to have nothing to envyÓ, 10), nÕavoir pas rien changŽ(Ònot to have changed nothingÓ, 12), for a total of 85 over 185 (46 %).

The other half of cases has the expected DN reading, with 186attestations over 371 (50%). The interpretation relates to explicit acti-

vation in two thirds of cases (122 out of 186, 66%).

(17) a. - gamecube et wii ca nÕa rien a voir..- La Wii et la Gamecube ont tout en commun, cÕestexactement le mme hardware avec plus de mŽmoire etdes frŽquences plus ŽlevŽs (~500Mhz vs ~700Mhz),donc non •a nÕa pas rien avoir(http://www.frandroid.com/applications/57957_fpse-un-nouvel-emulateur-psx-bientot-sur-android)Ò- Gamecube and Wii have nothing to do with eachother- Wii and Gamecube have everything in common, itÕsthe same hardware with more memory and higher fre-quency, so, no, they havenÕt got nothing to do witheach otherÓ

b. - oui •a expliquerais peut-tre que le SAV nÕai rien vou-lu faire.



XE

- non (É) seulement le SAV nÕa pas rien fait, il a blo-quŽ ma xbox avec ce fameu bug. (http:// www.logic-sunrise.com/forums/topic/40737-aide-sav-xbox-360/ )Ò- Yes, that would maybe explain why the SAV wantedto do nothing- No, except the SAV didnÕt do nothing, it blocked myXbox with the well-known bugÓ

Explicit previous mention is often signalled by quotation marks andreference to an antecedent statement typically by another speaker.

(18) a. Locke nÕa pas Ç rien Žcrit en Žconomie È comme vousdites, (http://bien-vivre-a-ouzouer.over-blog.com/45-index.html)ÒLocke didnÕt Ôwrite nothing in economicsÕ, as you say

b. donc non, ce la nÕa pas rien ˆ voir de les comparer,contrairement ˆ ce que dit Pierre Waline.(http:// www.hu-lala.org )ÒSo, no, comparing them hasnÕt got nothing to do

with it, contrary to what Pierre Wamine says.Ó

The 64 non-explicitly activated cases of DN relate in a large majority ofcases to recurrent expressions (55 attestations). Such phrases include28 rien fait Òdone nothingÓ, 16 rien ˆ voir Ònothing to do with itÓ , 5 ( jÕenai ) rien ˆ faire (lit. Ô(I have) nothing to do (of it)Õ, meaning ÒI donÕt careabout it Ó), 2 rien ˆ se mettre (Ònothing to wearÓ), 2 rien ˆ dire (Ònothing tosayÓ) and 2 rien Žcrit (Òwritten nothingÓ). Recurrent expressions are no-tably more frequent for DN than for NC: the four most frequentphrases noted for NC represent 46% of NC cases, while they accountfor 72% of all DN attestations.

The IS status of the relevant examples of the sequence ÒnÕa pasrienÓ on Google France in March 2013 is summarised by the followingtable.



XG

Explicitly

activated

Other Totals

DN 122 64 (55 withrecurrent

expressions)

186

NC 39 146 185

161 210 371

!&01# >; .5+4'50/45,* ,- '#&)5*3 ,- E*F& D&+ '5#*G 5* H,,31# I'&*=#

These results, found to be statistically significant following a chi-squaretest, are entirely unexpected in that just over half of cases have a DN

interpretation in a context that is strongly biased in favour of DN. Thissupports the view that DN is marked, and that NC is a default optionexercised even in an unfavourable environment. Markedness of DN isfurther supported by its relation to the specific trigger of IS configura-tion. Two-third of DN attestations (66%) relate to the rejected propo-sition being explicitly activated in the antecedent context, and thereforeaccessible to the hearer, i.e. discourse-old. For he remaining third ofDN cases that were not found to have explicitly discourse-old status,86% are used with recurrent expressions such as having nothing to do withit , which are arguably accessible to the hearer as well by virtue of beingpart of the linguistic common repertoire. The fact that 96% of occur-

rences (177/186) are found to relate to a specific trigger supports DNmarkedness. The unexpectedly low number of occurrences of DN readings

in a context biased for DN is calling for some confirmation. The studyof configurations exemplified in (8) Jean ne fait pas rien could be ideallycomplemented by that in (3) Personne ne fait rien . However, these arefound to have a NC interpretation in usage, and attestations with DN



XW

are extremely difficult to find in French (only one attestation being cit-ed by LarrivŽe 2004: 166). Google is a poor search engine for such rareconfigurations, and there is as of yet no extensive collection of search-able French non-literary texts. As a DN language, English should havestrongly preponderant DN interpretation for examples such as (1) No- body is doing nothing, which would allow to check for the intervention ofIS factors. The configuration was searched for through the co-occurrence of nothing and nobody at the maximal distance of 9 words al-lowed by the search engine of the COCA corpus made available atBrigham Young University. Of the 480 examples that were returned,110 were relevant in having the two n-words in the same clause. Thehigher proportion of noise in the English (77%) than in the French(17%) search follows form an exact string not being set and from thegreater distance between the items. Also, cases of coordination wereexcluded from the count, as this is a context previously unnoticed inexisting studies that exclusively allows NC readings2. The following canonly mean that the person in question was not going to be disturbed,and not that she was going to be disturbed by everything and everyone.

(19) Nobody and nothing was going to disturb her, not whileDaddy was around.

In any event, the relevant 110 occurrences only yielded 6 cases of DN.Each case involved constituent scope of n-word nothing in the expres-sion for nothing rejected by the other negative expression, as illustratedbelow.

F D "#)+#L#" 4&L#)#" ,&>#* >4/> m/ %/"/JJ#J "#/2+,6? +,)&J)+,6 ,#+>4#" @&,$@&"2 ,&" 2&5IJ# ,#6/>+&,? *##7* %&**+IJ# L+>4 @&,Q5,@>+&,- d4#"#/* !'8'*.

*&* ('%9&(# 7+64> I# *##, /* #Z5+)/J#,> >& ('8'*. *&* $(.%9&(# +, / <3 "#/2$

+,6? /,2 >& 05"-.8'*. *&* 7'3"%9&(# +, / H< "#/2+,6? >4# *#,>#,@# : ;$(% ('*'#7 $(* (' 4$%7 @/, ,#+>4#" 7#/, : ;$(% (' *'#7 $(* $(. 4$%7? ,&" : ;$(% "5"6

-. *'# $(* 7'3" 4$%<7=/ D *>/,2/"2 +,>#"%"#>/>+&, +,)&J)+,6 +,>#"*#@>+&, &"

5,+&, &' 6#,#"/J+n#2 Z5/,>+'+#"* 8/ J/ _##,/, o O/J>n XkUG? &" /,M &>4#" c&,$

>/6&)+/, /%%"&/@4: @&""#@>JM %"#2+@>* >4/> >4# >L& ,#6/>+)# Z5/,>+'+#"* 2&,&> @/,@#J &5>? /,2 2& ,&> "#Z5+"# / *%#@+/J "#/2+,6 '&" &,# &' >4# ,#6/>+)#

Z5/,>+'+#"* 8/* +, <3: #+>4#"-p



Xl

(20) a. I'm willing to bet you your weight in pure Kona coffeethat you've got some completely self-serving reason forcoming to Bixby's rescue. Nobody does good deeds fornothing, not in this world. I wasn't born yesterday.

b. their love of God is based on a sentimental relationism,or it is out of a disguised self-interest according to mar-ket ideologies (in Parry's words, " nobody does any-thing for nothing ").

In other words, in the 450 million words of the COCA corpus of American English, with nothing and nobody of which there are respec-tively 144 737 and 39 264 occurrences, not one case of Double Nega-tion expressed by two n-words with shared scope over the same predi-cate.

The unsatisfactory results for cases equivalent to (3) led me toreturn to English equivalents of (8). Search for the co-occurrence of notand nobody in the COCA corpus at a distance of 4 words yield 588 re-sults (a distance of 9 yielded 8 059 cases, which did not seem on a rap-id assessment to add a significant number of relevant cases). Choice ofnot was motivated by the intention to exclude dialectal or register varie-ties where contracted negative and NC would be expected to be pre-ponderant (Rowlett 1998). Of these results, 49 examples provided notand nobody with scope over the same clause.

The 49 attestations comprised 30 cases of NC. Of these, 14 oc-currences are activated,

(21) a. Why don't you ask Mrs. -- " Todd's hands went up inprotest. " Nope, nope. Not asking nobody

b. I'm not Gertrude's cook any more. I'm not nobody's.

and 16 are not.

(22) a. "I figured, hey, they've brought us another kicker inhere," McKenzie said. Then he found out Detmer wasthe backup quarterback. "I told the guys, ' We'd betternot let nobody get a hand on this guy.Ó

b. But see, my brother's off on this fishing trip, him andhis wife. Left his van at our mom's house in Nanticoke



XU

Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it.

The 19 cases of Double Negation comprise 16 occurrences of activa-tion (84 %), of which 4 representative examples are given below.

(23) a. - REMY Oh... him? He's nobody.GUSTEAU Not nobody. He is part of the kitchen.

b. everybody who's listening or those that are not listening-- hope nobody is not listening to your show today.

c. They know me, " his wife's uncle said. " You, " he said," are not nobody but my niece Marice's husband.

d. It's the matter of being worried or not. I mean, nobody is not worried.

8 are explicitly activated. 8 involve a correction, that accommodates therejected proposition as discourse-old (LarrivŽe 2012). The 3 occurrenc-es that are not explicitly activated distribute with modal verbs as in(24), and in 1 other contexts (25).

(24) a. I recall Mahalia Jackson said years ago that nobody could not be a believer after they had heard certainkinds of gospel;

b. I'm going out there for a weight program. We're goingto be together and we're going to get things workedout. This is for her and me to work things out. That'smy pride and joy right there. Nobody might not be-lieve that, Jerry, but she is.

(25) The fact is that either through a misread of intelligence or anoverreaching interpretation of rather poor intelligence, we tooka nation that was very sharply contained, the Iraq regime underSaddam Hussein, who nobody loves and nobody supports ornobody is not glad to see gone,

The results from the search are summarised in the following table.



Xk

Explicitly

activated

Other Totals

DN 16 3 (2 withrecurrent

expressions)

19

NC 14 16 30

30 19 49

!&01# @; .5+4'50/45,* ,- '#&)5*3 ,- =,J,==/''#*=# ,- !"#"$% &*) !"' 5* CKC<

This confirms what was found for the same configuration in French.Despite English being a DN language, and despite the configuration

being strongly biased in favour of DN, DN is a minority reading. While explicit activation plays a role for a little under half of NC cases,it associates to 84% of English DN, which a standard statistical testshows to be significant. When not explicitly discourse-old, DN casesrelate to recurrent expressions in 2 cases out of 3. Both triggers ac-count for 95% of English DN data, thus supporting the markedness ofDN as well as the French data do.

A final confirmation of DN markedness even in DN-biasedconfigurations and of the role of contextual cues and IS determinantsfor the interpretation is sought by looking at adjacent uses of clause-mate not in the Coca corpus. The 204 395 single occurrences of not

yield 102 hits, of which 89 are clause-mate. There are 34 cases that donot have a DN interpretation: they are found in spoken and writtenpress and may or may not relate to performance errors (as described inHorn 2010: 124-128), although some of these appear genuine cases ofnegative spread.



F]

(26) a. On game point you do not not drive to the basket without receiving a nasty hack.

b. victims should be remembered by their friends andloved ones for who they were, not not for the horrible

way they died.

with a possible emphatic value for the examples above. Explicit activa-tion plays a role for 13 occurrences (38% of NC), non-activated casesco-occurring with modals in 8 further cases (24% of NC).

The 55 DN cases relate to explicit activation in a little underhalf of the occurrences (49%).

(27) a. in my book, it's not about the weight. But it's not not about weight if you're uncomfortable in your body.

b. Aren't those sex toys? " # " Not exactly, I don't think.But they're not not sex toys, either.

In 1 case, it is the positive proposition rather than the negative one that was present in the antecedent context.

(28) TREVOR : I know she's a beautiful woman, and so I've seenthat. And... TRINA: Yes, but I'm not not beautiful now,though. That's the problemÉ

The 28 cases of DN that do not involve explicit activation are massive-ly co-occuring with modal verbs, typically can , with 26 examples (93%of non-explicitly activated DN instances).

(29) a. She stops. They will all think she is crazy if she doesn'tstop. You can not not expect people to understandsuch things as your whole body coming to the strangest,most vivid kind of life when the sight of something inthe present sparks a memory of the past.

b. On the other hand, even in the churches you can onlytrust up to a certain degree. Everyone knows that thereare some people in the churches whose job it is to re-port things to the police. And, in fact, they can not not do that because they don't know who else is an inform-er in the community.



FX

A summary of results is provided by the table below:

Explicitlyactivated

Other Totals

DN 27 28 (26 with

recurrentexpressions)

55

NC 13 21 34

40 49 89

!&01# B; .5+4'50/45,* ,- '#&)5*3 ,- &)L&=#*4 !"' !"' 5* CKC<

The configuration with two adjacent clausal negators yields a majorityof DN readings. This strongly supports markedness of DN, as in the

context that would appear to most favour it, NC still occurs in 38% ofoccurrences. As for the DN cases, half have discourse-old status(49%), which was not found to be statistically significant. The otherhalf of cases that are not discourse-old relate to recurrent expressionsfor 93% of them. 96% of all DN occurrences were however tied to ei-ther IS or recurrent expression, which as previously support DN mark-edness. The significance of the results presented in this section is dis-cussed in the concluding discussion that follows.

M; C,*=1/)5*3 )5+=/++5,*

This paper addresses the issue of negative dependencies between mul-tiple clause-mate negative items. Conclusive results on Negative Con-cord and Double Negation interpretations are provided as to the fol-lowing assumptions:



FF

1. Double Negation is a marked interpretation wrt NegativeConcord;2. The markedness of DN implies that it is triggered by particu-lar contextual cues;3. The defining trigger of DN relates to Information Structure.

These assumptions are assessed by looking at actual usage of French(Google France) and English (COCA Corpus) for three types of claus-es with multiple negatives: clausal negator plus n-word as in (2) and (8),two n-words as in (1) and (3), and two clausal negators as in He did notnot work.

Co-occurrences of clausal negator plus n-word as in (2) and (8)is believed to be strongly biased in favour of DN in English, as it is inFrench. Yet, half the occurrences (186 out of 371) are DN in theFrench data, and even fewer in the English material (19 out of 49).

While the presence of NC could be interpreted as a reflex of a NCmacro-parameter assumed to characterise French (Zeijlstra 2004), nosuch assumption can be made to explain the situation in English that issupposed to be a DN language. It could be argued that the weight ofNC is due to the inclusion in the corpus of social or regional varieties

where NC is allowed across the board. However, the choice of markersensured the exclusion of non-standard varieties, and while the internetmay contain a higher proportion of use of such varieties of French,there is no reason to believe that it is so for COCA which actually hasa higher rate of NC than Google France does.3 These observationssupport the conclusion that DN is marked. Markedness is stronglysupported by co-occurrences of two n-words as in (1) and (3). Such se-quences reading are very rare with a DN in real usage, as they are in theEnglish data. Not one of the 110 clauses with nobody and nothing scop-ing over the same predicate is DN, which is found only in 6 cases

^ !/>"+@K H5''J#M @&""#@>JM +2#,>+'+#* 8FX: /,2 8FF: /* 2+*%J/M+,6 ,&,$%"#*@"+%>+)# '#/>5"#*-cM %&+,> +* >4/> <3 "#/2+,6* &' @J/5*#7/># ,#6/>+)#* +, #+>4#" 9,6J+*4 &" O"#,@4 @/,,&> I#

#P%J/+,#2 /L/M IM "#J#6/>+,6 >4#7 #P@J5*+)#JM >& "#6+&,/J 2+/J#@>* K,&L, &,JM >& *&7#

*%#/K#"*S >4# 2/>/ *566#*>* >4/> *%#/K#"* &' >4#*# J/,65/6#* /"# /IJ# >& %"&25@# /,2 5,$

2#"*>/,2 @J/5*#7/># ,#6/>+)#* L+>4 / <3 "#/2+,6 8*## >4# #)+2#,@# +, RJ/,@4#>># F]X^:-

.4+* &' @&5"*# +* L4/> +* #P%#@>#2 +' <3 +* 5,7/"K#2 '&" %*M@4&J+,65+*>+@ "#/*&,* /* 2+*@5*$

*#2 I#J&L- .4# )#4#7#,> 2#,+/J &' >4+* /I+J+>M IM *&7# *%#/K#" +* / >#*>+7&,M >& >4#

*>"#,64> &' %"#*@"+%>+)# #P4&">/>+&,* +, @&775,+>+#* L+>4 / ,&"7/>+)# >"/2+>+&, 8\/*%#J$

7/>4 XkklS *#@>+&, U-F:-



F^

where nothing has constituent scope. Markedness is also suggested byco-occurrences of clausal negators as in He did not not work, which areDN in English in half the occurrences. That NC creeps in even inmost unfavourable contexts tallies with the observation by Espinal andPrieto that 32% of subjects still choose a NC reading in DN-biasedenvironments (see also Espinal, Tubau, Borrˆs-Comes and Prieto this

volume), and with the recent experimental results from Amaral and Varnadoe-Russ (2013) demonstrating strong preference for NC overDN.

Assumptions 2. and 3. are well supported by the data. The ex-pectation is that the rejected negative clause is discourse-old, and therejecting negator is discourse-new. In other words, in (2) John is not doing nothing meaning It is not the case that John is doing nothing , not would benew information rejecting old information represented by John is doingnothing . Using only the most manifest type of discourse-old informationas what has been explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context, DNreadings of clauses such as (2) and (8) relate to the rejected sequencebeing discourse-old in 66% of cases in French and 84% in English.

This is significant as NC readings associate to discourse-old configura-tions in 21% in French and 47% in English. 49% of English DN se-quences such as John did not not work are discourse-old. Almost all of thenon-explicitly activated DN cases for each configuration relate to re-current expressions, including French conventional expressions (nota-bly I have not Òdone nothingÓ, It has not Ògot nothing to do with itÓ ), Englishcorrections (of the type He is not nobody , with 50% of explicitly activatedEnglish DN) and modals (11% of non-explicitly activated English con-figuration John is not doing nothing , 47% of non-explicitly activated con-figuration John is not not working ).



FE

Configuration DN

interpretation

as % of total

corpora

occurrences

Explicitly

activated DN

as % of total

DN

Not explicitly

activated DN

with recurrent

expressions as

% of total DN

Percentage of

DN not tied to

an identified

trigger as % of

total DN

(2)ohn

is not

do ing

nothing

39% 84% 11% 5%

(8)ean

ne fai t

pas r ien

50% 66% 30% 5%

ohn is

not not

working

69% 49% 47% 4%

!&01# B; .5+4'50/45,* ,- .2 '#&)5*3+ 5* 4#'A+ ,- ?*-,'A&45,* N4'/=4/'#

Strong contextual co-occurrences are arguably a type of discourse-oldinformation in the sense that they are linguistic sequences accessible toboth speaker and hearer as part of the common linguistic repertoire.

The convergent role of explicit activation and recurrent expressionsand their massive representation for DN interpretations confirm the

role of a discourse-old / discourse-new partition for DN readings. They show that DN is marked because it relates to two identifiabletriggers, which together account for 95% of attestations.

While an Information Structure analysis of Double Negationreadings is strongly supported, and on the basis of only the most re-strictive explicit activation criteria, there is a need for some qualifica-tions. The formulated expectation that the rejected negative clause



FG

would be discourse-old is not always the case. The predicate is alwaysdiscourse-old, but the rejected n-word isnÕt always. Example (23b)above is a case in point

(23) b. everybody who's listening or those that are not listening-- hope nobody is not listening to your show today.

It is the predicate that is discourse-old, and neither negative is men-tioned before, although nothing is accommodated as activated as sug-gested by the paraphrase I hope itÕs not the case that nobody is listening. Thereis a similar case cited in (28) among the 27 occurrences of activatedDN found in the not not configuration.

Information Structure configurations are also realised throughrecurrent expressions. 42% of English DN cases for examples such as(1) are found in correction environments of the type not nobody ; 72% ofthe French cases relating to (8) are found with the four most frequentcontexts; 47% of DN with two clausal negators in English relate tomodal verb environments.4 That is not to say that DN cannot occuroutside these environments, but some collocational environments def-initely favour a DN reading. This further supports assumption 2 abovethat DN markedness relates to specific contextual triggers. (It waspointed out that NC has one categorical trigger, and that is coordina-tion, illustrated by (19), for which an explanation is yet to be offered bytheoretical models, although see footnote 2.) This contradicts a macro-parameter analysis in which French would be NC across the board andEnglish DN. The presence of NC to significant degrees in two DN-biased configurations in both languages does not support a macro-parametric analysis where one language would favour NC and the oth-er DN. The fact that configurations with two clausal negators are morerelated to DN that the other two configurations further illustrate therelation of negative dependencies to specified environments, against amacro-parametric approach. The absence of contextual cues in a lan-

E C,# L&5J2 L/,> >4+* &I*#")/>+&, >& "#@#+)# /, #P%J/,/>+&,- B *%#@5J/># >4/> >4#"# /"# >L&

%"&I/IJ# "#/*&,* '&" 9,6J+*4 %"#'#"#,@# '&" H< +, 7&2/J #,)+"&,7#,>*S >4#M 7/K# %/">+$

>+&, &' >4# 2+*@&5"*#$,#L ,#6/>&" /,2 >4# 2+*@&5"*#$&J2 ,#6/>+)# %"&%&*+>+&, #/*+#" >&

@&7%5># /* >4# 2+*@&5"*#$&J2 ,#6/>+)# @/, I# "#J/>#2 >& >4# +,'+,+>+)# )#"IT *5@4 / %/">+>+&,

@/, /J*& I# 4#J%#2 IM >4# >#,2#,@M &' 7&2/J* >& "/,6# &)#" /J>#",/>+)# #)#,>? +,@J52+,6

,&,$"#/J+*/>+&,? >45* '/@+J+>/>+,6 %/"*+,6 &' 2&5IJ# ,#6/>+)#*- .4# 2#7&,*>"/>+&, &' #+>4#"

>4#*# *%#@5J/>+&,* */2JM 6&#* I#M&,2 >4# *@&%# &' >4+* @4/%>#"-



FW

guage may account for the difficulties in eliciting DN, Romanian beinga case in point (Falaus 2006), calling for further examination.

If parameters are not responsible for negative dependencies,then what is? The comparable situation in English and French suggestthat we may be dealing with a psycholinguistic bias rather than somecategorical parameter. An indication of this is the general assumptionthat all Creoles allow NC (DŽprez 1999), and given that Creoles are be-lieved to provide with unmarked options (e.g. Bickerton 1981), NC

would therefore represent a universally unmarked option, forcing DNto be signalled by contextual factors. Such a conclusion would needsupport from acquisitional studies. The prediction if there is a cogni-tive bias in favour of NC is that the acquisition and processing of DN

would appear later or be more demanding. Fortunately, such studies doexist, and the results they document tally with expectations. Zhou,

Thornton and Crain (2013) establishes that whereas NC was unprob-lematic to Mandarin-speaking children, these did not achieve adult-likeresults in comprehension and production of DN until age 6, before

which they interpreted and produced DN configurations as NC. Thissuggests that the non-adult performance of children before age 6 mightbe due to working memory limitations, echoing the claim by Corblinthat DN is more difficult to process than NC. There are reasonablegrounds to propose that DN markedness is due to a bias in favour ofNC because the latter is easier to process. We are back to CorblinÕsproposals, although with rather a better empirical basis to support theclaim.

The work presented here establishes the following:1Õ. that DN is a marked reading with respect to NC, the latterbeing found even in DN-biased environments;2Õ. that markedness is found in DN being associated to colloca-tional environments that vary according to languages and to thespecific configuration involved (recurrent expressions forFrench Jean ne fait pas rien , corrections and modals for He is notdoing nothing, modals for John is not not working )3Õ. that DN is strongly correlated to an IS partition such thatthe rejected negative clause is discourse-old and the rejectingnegative is discourse-new.

It has been put forward that DN markedness is due to a psycholinguis-tic bias in favour of NC. That would be why DN is correlated to avail-



Fl

able collocational environments, in the absence of which DN would beelusive, as it the case of Romanian. The differential behaviour of con-figurations (two clausal negators vs. two n-words) is calling for expla-nation, and it can be noted that this runs counter to predictions thatNC obtains more readily when negative expressions are of the sametype (Biberauer and Roberts 2012), since two n-words should then be-have in the same way with respect to NC as two clausal negators do,contrary to observations in this paper that n-words rarely cancel eachother out whereas more often than not two clausal negators do. Final-ly, while Information Structure plays a crucial role, it is not a categori-cal trigger of DN in usage,5 since it occurs also with NC, and since DNis found without the expected IS partition, although in that case almostalways with recurrent expressions.

One question that could be asked if whether the expected ISpartition always generates DN. One way to test this would be throughan experimental protocol. Such a protocol could be based on a narra-tion that is ideal to assess IS factors such as explicit activation. Thenarration could introduce a discourse-old negative proposition in a nar-ration, that is to be found with a negator later on, to check whether aNC or DN reading is understood by subjects. An illustration of possi-ble verbal stimuli is provided by the short text below.

(27) Pour lÕanniversaire de Marie, Paul sÕŽtait bien prŽparŽ. Il avaitinvitŽ plusieurs personnes. Il avait achetŽ un beau cadeau,commandŽ du champagne et rŽservŽ un bon traiteur. Il craig-nait cependant que les invitŽs ne mangent rien parce que la fteavait lieu en aprs-midi.ÒFor MarieÕs birthday, Paul was well prepared. He had invitedseveral people. He had bought a nice present, ordered cham-pagne et reserved a good catering service. He feared howeverthat people would eat nothing because the party was takingplace in the afternoon.Ó

G <&,$@/>#6&"+@/J /**&@+/>+&, +* #P%#@>#2 /@@&"2+,6 >& / "#)+#L#" I#@/5*# L# /"# 2#/J+,6L+>4 %"/67/>+@ 7/>>#"*? L4+@4 L&5J2 &,JM I# "#J/>#2 >& 6"/77/>+@/J >#,2#,@+#*- B @&5J2

,&> 2+*/6"## 7&"#- B 4/)# #*>/IJ+*4#2 +, 0/""+)1# 8F]XX: >4/> *&7# 7/"K#2 ,#6/>+)#* /"#

@/>#6&"+@/JJM 5*#2 L+>4 2+*@&5"*#$&J2 %"&%&*+>+&,*? /,2 >4/> &,@# >4+* @/>#6&"+@/J /**&@+/$

>+&, +* J&*>? >4# ,#6/>+)# #+>4#" I#@&7#* / 2#'/5J> &" 2+*/%%#/"*-



FU

a. Personne nÕa rien mangŽ, tout le monde Žtait content,et Marie Žtait ravie de son cadeau.ÒNobody ate nothing, everybody was happy and Marie

was delighted with her present.Ób. Les invitŽs nÕont pas rien mangŽ, tout le monde Žtait

content, et Marie Žtait ravie de son cadeau.ÒThe guests did not eat nothing, everybody was happyand Marie was delighted with her present.Ó

The understanding of the critical sentence can be checked by pictureselection, by judgment on comments provided by a third party (typical-ly puppets in experiments with children), or more naturally on dis-course continuation (adding either to the extent that more food was neededfor DN or so that the food had to be given away for NC). The prediction

would be that DN should be categorical with the expected IS partition. This papers hopes to have provided a base-line for the study of

Double Negation interpretation in natural languages. It shows that In-formation Structure plays an important role in establishing DoubleNegation readings, which associates to particular co-occurrences withthe various configurations ( John is not doing nothing, John is not not working ). The need for these triggers demonstrate that DN is marked, asdoes the fact that NC is found in environments biased in favour ofDN. Contextual triggers matter to interpretation in actual usage, as it isthe basis for language learning and therefore for the cognitive devel-opment and structure of language. The markedness of DN argues forthe existence of a cognitive bias in favour of Negative Concord inter-pretation, presumably for reasons of ease of treatment. I hope to pur-sue the relations between cognitive processes and negative dependen-cies in future endeavours.

O; P#-#'#*=#+

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