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Normalized frequencies of temporal adjuncts in affirmation and negation in English, Finnish and Korean
Source publication
One cross-linguistically recurrent asymmetry between affirmation and negation is the neutralization of tense-aspect distinctions in negatives. A functional explanation proposed for this is that in their typical discourse context negatives have less need for temporal specification than affirmatives and in some languages this discourse preference is...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... temporal adjuncts are of primary importance from the point of view of our hypothesis, we will now focus more closely on this particular class of adjuncts. Figure 4 displays the frequencies of clauses that contain at least one temporal adjunct in each of the three languages. The frequencies have been normalized to 1,000 clause tokens; because of this, the numbers for Korean differ from the raw frequencies in Figure 3. ...
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Citations
This article extends the study of (a)symmetries in negation to the domain of (negative) imperatives. It examines a balanced sample of the world's languages for distinctions in tense, direction/location and intersubjectivity and observes that, like with asymmetry in standard negation, they are often neutralized from positive to negative but not vice versa. Intersubjective marking is found to be somewhat exceptional in that the opposite situation does occasionally occur. The article also tests whether and confirms that these asymmetries are grounded in usage patterns, with a corpus investigation of English and Dutch (negative) imperatives. It proposes negation's discourse presuppositionality, which has been argued to account for neutralization in standard negation, as an explanation for most but not all of these typological and usage-based results in imperative negation too. It nevertheless makes a case for other, more imperative-specific motivations as well.
