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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
... are further divided into several semantic categories which will be relevant for how we code our data. Hasselgård's (2010: 23-31) classification is presented in Table 1. Some of the categories have sub-categories. ...Context 2
... Section 2, we hypothesized that affirmative clauses would have more temporal adjuncts than negative clauses do. To test this hypothesis, we classified the adjuncts in our data further into the types identified by Hasselgård (2010); see Table 1 above. Figure 1 displays the raw frequencies of each adverbial class in the English data. ...Context 3
... analysing the Korean data, we largely refer to the classification of adverbials in Sohn (1999: 394-400), but what Sohn (1999: 397-398) labels as modal adverbials translate into a category of disjuncts here. The same coding scheme (Table A1) is applied similarly to the English data, with the following Korean-specific solutions. ...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.
