Figure - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
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...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... adopted this classification among the many found in the literature because it has been used for corpus data and because Biber and colleagues provide extensive documentation for it, which facilitated our analysis. This classification is presented in Table 2 along with examples. Note that the example verbs are only suggestive: the semantic type was determined contextually, and some verb lexemes have multiple senses that may fall under different types, e.g. ...Context 2
... ha-can occur in its original sense 'to do' (activity) or in its extended meaning 'to say ' (communication). Compared to the base rates of occurrence for different verb types, space adverbials have been found to be more prevalent than expected in clauses whose verbs express material processes (Hasselgård 2010: 191-193, drawing on Halliday 1994, which roughly correspond to activity verbs in Table 2. Temporal adverbials ("time adverbials" in Hasselgård's terminology) are quite evenly distributed across verb types (Hasselgård 2010: 206-207). ...Similar publications
Quantifier-negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in many languages, but this phenomenon is not observed in Chinese. Building on the work of Chen and Huan (2023), this study investigates whether early Korean-Chinese bilinguals can make a distinction between Korean and Chinese in terms of the inverse scope. Employing the sentence-picture...
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.
