Johan van der Auwera

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Linguistics

Since Ladusaw (1979) the term ‘free choice indefinite’ is the generally accepted term for the meaning of any in primarily modal and generic sentences, such as Any owl hunts mice, but not for what is generally called the ‘polarity-sensitive’ or ‘negative polarity’ meaning, as in Did you take any? At least part of the inspiration for Ladusaw was Vend...

The book presents the most wide-ranging treatment of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and...

This study compares standard negation in the indigenous languages of South America to the rest of the world. We show that South American languages not only prefer postverbal negation to preverbal negation and negative morphology to syntax, but postverbal morphological negation to any other negation strategy. The predominance of this strategy makes...

This study compares standard negation in the indigenous languages of South America to the rest of the world. We show that South American languages not only prefer postverbal negation to preverbal negation and negative morphology to syntax, but postverbal morphological negation to any other negation strategy. The predominance of this strategy makes...

In the Jê languages standard negators tend to take a post-verbal position. This paper asks why this should be the case and therefore discusses earlier accounts relating Jê standard negators to either negative verbs or privative postpositions. We argue that these accounts do not have to exclude each other. In particular, we propose that an existenti...

The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying pe...

In some languages assertions about ‘somebody’ or ‘nobody’ are existential in a strong sense, i.e. they need or prominently allow an explicit syntactic marker of existence (‘there is’, ‘exist’). This paper presents a state-of-the-art typology of existential indefinite constructions and finds the typological understanding to be inconclusive in many r...

This paper aims to advance the general understanding of negative concord (as in English We don't need no education) and connective negation (as in English neither … nor') through an analysis of Persian. For negative concord with indefinites the analysis highlights differences between human vs. non-human and pronominal vs. nominal negative concord....

This paper explores the interaction between connective negation (‘neither ... nor’) and negative concord, an issue that has not received much attention. It looks at different ‘negative concord’ languages, viz. Croatian, Spanish, and French. The approach is synchronic; the data come from existing descriptions and from native speaker judgments. The p...

The paper sketches the state of affairs of our understanding of postverbal negation. It departs from the typological finding that there is a cross-linguistic preference for a negator to precede the verb. Nevertheless, a sizable proportion of the world’s languages adhere to a pattern with a negator following the verb, and such negators are typically...

With negative indefinite pronouns the Balto-Slavic languages all exhibit strict negative concord. In this study we investigate how negative concord functions in a context in which a connective negator (‘neither ... nor’) combines either phrases or clauses. We show that there are various types of non-concordant patterns.

This paper explores the interaction between connective negation (type ‘neither ... nor’) and negative concord. It looks at different ‘negative concord’ languages, viz. Croatian, Spanish and French. It describes the many idiosyncrasies but also lays bare some of the similarities.

The paper aims to advance the general understanding of negative concord through a comparative analysis of nominal and pronominal negative concord in Jamaican and Belizean Creole, based on the translations of the New Testament. It supplies a general characterization of Jamaican and Belizean negative concord and then focuses on negative concord with...

In the Tupi-Guarini languages the ancestral 'thing' word has developed a fair number of grammatical uses, either on its own or together with other material. The paper surveys these uses and their diachronies, with respect to both general issues of grammaticalization from a 'thing' source or to debates specific to Tupi-Guarani languages. We first su...

This paper surveys the form and the position of the negators of declarative verbal main clauses in the Chibchan languages. It attempts to describe the similarities and the differences, and it ventures hypotheses about the diachrony, primarily with an appeal to the Jespersen and Negative Existential Cycles. It sketches if and how the negators fit mo...

This paper surveys the form and the position of the negators of declarative verbal main clauses in the Chibchan languages. It attempts to describe the similarities and the differences, and it ventures hypotheses about the diachrony, primarily with an appeal to the Jespersen and Negative Existential Cycles. It sketches if and how the negators fit mo...

This chapter discusses a number of central phenomena in the typology of negation, build­ing on state-of-the-art typological research. The focus lies on standard negation, prohibi­tive negation, existential negation, and the negation of indefinites. Cross-linguistic varia­tion is central in the discussion, and for most phenomena the question is addr...

The paper revisits negation in the Zaparoan languages Arabela, Iquito and Záparo. For Iquito, which exhibits single, double as well as triple negation, we adopt a Jespersen Cycle perspective and for Záparo and Arabela it is the Negative Existential Cycle which proves enlightening. We speculate that both in Iquito and Záparo there is a diachronic li...

This study deals with clausal negation in Awa Pit, a Barbacoan language spoken in South America. By bringing together the data on negation from different varieties of the language, we present an analysis of synchronic patterns of negation marking. Based on the variation we suggest a number of innovations in the negation system, for which we put for...

This study reconstructs the development of a negative existential and a negative pro-sentence in the Arawan language Kulina (Brazil-Peru). We demonstrate that the two elements forming the negative existential construction nowe (hi)ra- are involved in a double polarity swap: (i) an originally neutral lexical item (the dynamic verb nowe ‘show’) has b...

This study aims to account for some dimensions of the strictness and of what will be called the 'range' of Negative Concord in Jamaican (also 'Jamaican Creole' or 'Patwa') and in so doing to increase our typological understanding of Negative Concord. As to the strictness, parameters will be the position of the negative indefinite relative to the ve...

In the synchronic and diachronic typology of negation three so-called 'cycles' have been prominent: the Jespersen Cycle, the Negative Existential Cycle and the Quantifier Cycle. This paper refines these notions, sketches what is cyclical about them and shows how they relate to one another. For the Jespersen Cycle it is argued that it crucially invo...

This is a study of the similatives, the category that English such resorts under, in Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Kannada and Telugu. The reason for focusing on these five languages is double. First, their similatives have not received any scholarly attention. Second, the properties of these South-Asian similatives significantly add to our understanding of...

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the semantic and formal properties of the English word such and some of its counterparts in other languages. The proposal is that such words are ‘demonstrative similatives’ (or, equivalently, ‘similative demonstratives’), i.e., their meanings lie at the intersection of the semantic dimensions of similarity...

The paper offers a more refined typology of negative indefinites

It is shown how Kiranti languages often express a semantically single clausal negation of a declarative verbal main clause with two clausal negators. We conjecture that the second negator has its origin in a copula and that the reinterpretation and integration of the copula into a negative construction follows the scenario known as a “Jespersen Cyc...

Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wea...

This paper has three main points. First, contrary to what is often stated, negative concord is not all that frequent and certainly not the most frequent strategy to express single clausal negation in a clause with an indefinite noun phrase or adverbial in the scope of the negation. Second, the subtype of negative concord called ‘strict negative con...

English such has a variety of uses, which nearly always involve the expression of similarity, and such can therefore be called a ?similative'. Swedish sådan has very similar uses. However, the two similatives differ strongly with respect to the frequency of some of these uses. Thus such, different from sådan, rarely functions as a noun or pronoun,...

This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the...

In the recent literature a number of articles have been dedicated to the study of comparative modal constructions (CMCs) in Germanic languages such as English, Dutch, and German. However, CMCs are not restricted to the Germanic area. The present paper presents original data from a Romance language, namely French, in which (at least) three CMCs are...

Negation refers to a kind of meaning, most intuitively paraphrased in terms of a speaker denying or contradicting something. This article deals with several aspects of negation from a typological point of view. It discusses the meaning and the form of negation. It distinguishes between scope and focus in the meaning section and contrariness and con...

The paper claims that the comparative concepts and descriptive categories of Haspelmath are not, pace Haspelmath, entities of a different type. The point is argued with a study of the properties of the English word such and of its counterparts in Dutch and Odia. The reason for choosing such is that it has proven difficult to categorize. It is argue...

This chapter uses Factiva® to examine recent evolution in the occurrence of verbal modal expressions in the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, in contrast with American and British newspapers. Previous research established that the frequency of the modals is decreasing in both British and American English generally, but increasing within...

In this paper, different types of indefinite pronouns and adverbs that can occur in negative sentences in the Uralic languages will be described and discussed against a wider typological background. It will be shown that Uralic languages display the typological default strategy as to the interaction with sentential negation – Uralic indefinite pron...

The paper deals with the verb embracing double negation found in both Chamic and Bahnaric languages and with the question how it developed. We propose both an internal and external explanation. The former relates to what is called a ‘Jespersen Cycle’, a hypothesis about the renewal of single negation out of double negation, itself developing out of...

The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking are...

This article focuses on modal expressions with the comparative adverbial better, i.e. had better, ’d better and better. These are peripheral modal constructions in that they are traditionally classified as falling outside the ‘core modal auxiliary’ category and even the ‘marginal modal’ category (dare, need, ought to and used to). Instead, they are...

This book arose in part from a symposium on Language Universals organized by the Linguistic Society of Belgium in December 1988. We selected some of the papers presented there, to which we added the papers by Dobrovol'skij, Haberland and Heltoft, Müller-Gotama, and Wierzbicka. Some of the less semantically oriented papers from the Symposium were pu...

This paper gives an overview of post-verbal negative marking in Bantu languages. It shows that, although Bantu studies tend to concentrate on negation marked on the verb itself, post-verbal negative markers are well represented within the Bantu domain and high concentrations can be found in zones B, C, H and L. It is argued that locative pronouns,...

The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking are...

This article provides a survey of scalar additive operators such as Turkish 'bile', Japanese 'sae', Korean 'cocha' 'even' , etc. and related expressions in a sample of thirteen Transeurasian languages. The data is presented and interpreted against the background of evidence from European languages and with the question of shared grammaticalization...

Irregularität als sprachwissenschaftliches Konzept ist bisher nur unzureichend erforscht. Die Aufsätze dieses Sammelbandes widmen sich der Irregularität in der Flexions-, Derivations- und Kompositionsmorphologie und leisten damit einen Beitrag zum besseren Verständnis von Irregularität. Die Beiträge zielen darauf ab herauszufinden, wo Regelhaftigke...

This book presents research on grammaticalization, the process by which lexical items acquire grammatical function, grammatical items get additional functions, and grammars are created. Scholars from around the world introduce and discuss the core theoretical and methodological bases of grammaticalization, report on work in the field, and point to...

This paper investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its prop...

The paper looks back at Hawkins (1986), A comparative typology of English and German , and shows, on the basis of raising and human impersonal pronouns in English, Dutch and German, that contrastive linguistics can be viewed as a pilot study in typology. It also pleads for doing the contrastive linguistics of three languages rather than of two, not...

Against a general background of the question of what constitutes irrealis, the paper investigates whether there is any sense in which prohibitives (negative imperatives) are more irrealis than positive imperatives. The study operationalizes this issue in three ways on a sample of 179 languages and parameters are argued to include whether or not the...

This paper presents a contrastive study of the human impersonal pronouns man in Swedish and men in Dutch. Both impersonal pronouns are etymologically derived from man ‘human being’ and are known to share large parts of their referential meaning. However, there are important differences in the usage of the impersonal pronoun in both languages. In th...

This chapter looks into the relations between Cognitive Linguistics and linguistic typology. The first half of the chapter offers a 'neutral' characterization of the field of linguistic typology. Linguistic typology is defined as a cross-linguistic, descriptive as well as explanatory enterprise devoted to the unity and diversity of language with re...

This paper proffers a corpus-based study of the modal auxiliary need and its lexical counterpart need to in four Asian varieties of English, viz. Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippine and Indian English, in comparison to British and American English. We investigate the distribution of need and need to in positive and negative polarity contexts, their re...

Expression and interpretation of negation: An OT typology (henceforth EINOT) by Henriëtte de Swart is to a large extent a syntactic and semantic account of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of single and double negation in European languages. The French examples in 1 to 3 illustrate the phenomena. 1. a. Il ne peut venir ce soir. b. Il ne peut...

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 660-673

The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to l...

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of “raising” patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to...

Scalar additive operators, such as Engl. even, Fr. même, Germ. sogar, Sp. aun, and so forth, vary crosslinguistically in terms of their distributional behavior, in particular with respect to semantic and pragmatic properties of the sentential environment (scale-reversing vs. scale-preserving, negative vs. nonnegative). This article proposes a seman...