On Negative Eventualities, Negative Concord, and Negative Yes/No Questions

Adam Przepiórkowski

In: T. Matthews and D. Strolovitch (eds.), Proceeding of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 9 (SALT 9), CLC Publications, Ithaca, NY.

Abstract

The general aim of this paper is to argue for the existence and linguistic importance of negative eventualities. The paper is divided into three parts. First, it shows that arguments which led to the acceptance of events as first-class semantic objects apply also to negative eventualities. Second, it argues that negative eventualities play the licensing role in Negative Concord. Third, it provides evidence from negative polar questions for the claim that negation is ambiguous between propositional and eventuality negation meanings. Although the considerations of this paper are compatible with a number of semantic frameworks, the results of the third part are formalized within Situation Semantics.

Electronically available formats (note that only PostScript is guaranteed to get Polish diacritics right on all platforms):

BibTeX entry: 

@InProceedings{prze:99a,
  author = 	 "Adam Przepi{\'o}rkowski",
  title = 	 "On Negative Eventualities, Negative Concord, and Negative
                  \emph{yes/no} Questions",
  editor =	 "T. Matthews and D. Strolovitch",
  pages =	 "237--254",
  booktitle =	 "Proceeding of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 9",
  year =	 1999,
  publisher =	 "CLC Publications",
  address =	 "Ithaca, NY"}

Creation Date: Tuesday, May 11, 1999
Last Modified: Sun Jan 15 15:08:26 CET 2006

AP