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On the syntax of English minimizers

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory volume 34, pages 739–760 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

The syntactic behaviour of English minimizers such as (not) a/one word, (not) a/one bit and (not) sleep a/one wink is puzzling: while they can behave as polarity items (PIs) in non-negative and negative contexts, they become negative quantifiers (NQs) when merged with a negation in negative contexts. Unlike previous accounts, where emphasis is put mainly on highlighting the similarity of minimizers to any-PIs and on supporting the contribution of an even-reading, I integrate the peculiar behaviour of minimizers in English within an analysis of negative indefinites as existential quantifiers that can structurally associate with negation in different ways. I claim that English minimizers contain three basic ingredients: a Numeral Phrase, a Focus particle and, in negative contexts, a Negative Phrase, not. The presence of a Focus particle even in the structure of minimizers plus the flexible merging possibilities of not with respect to the other two components of the minimizer result in their NQ-like behaviour, which can be now fully integrated into a theory of negative indefinites as syntactic objects that are compositionally built.

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Notes

  1. As discussed in Horn (1989), minimizers are already addressed in Pott (1857) and Wagenaar (1930), who provide numerous examples of these kind of expressions taken from a variety of Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Old Spanish, Italian, English, Dutch, German, and Slavic. With reference to Pott’s (1857:410) and Wagenaar’s (1930:74–75) examples, Horn gives a list of minimizers that contains

    “minimal quantities from the culinary domain (= ‘not a cherrystone, a chestnut, a crumb, an egg, a fava, a fig, a garlic, a grain, a leek, an oyster, a parsnip, a pea’), coins of little value, animals and body parts (‘not a cat’s tail, a hair, a mosquito, a lobster [sic], a sparrow’), and other objects of little value and/or salience (‘not an accent, an atom, a nail, a pinecone, a point, a shred, a splinter, a straw’).”

    (Horn 1989:452–453)

    Hoeksema (2009:23) distinguishes between minimizers, adverbial minimizers and minimizing predicates, which have been illustrated in (ia–c) respectively, and includes them in an admittedly partial list of different types of PIs in English.

    1. (i)
      figure a

  2. That minimizers yield a nicht einmal das ‘not even…’ reading when they occur in negative contexts was already noticed by Pott (1857:410).

  3. Vulgar minimizers, also known as ‘squatitive negation’ (Horn 2001) or ‘SQUAT’ (Postal 2004) seem to be inherently negative and can license any-PIs in English (but not in other languages such as Greek and Korean) (Giannakidou and Yoon 2011). Although discussing the syntax and semantics of vulgar minimizers is beyond the purpose of this paper, their existence shows that interesting differences exist within the class of minimizers not only in English, but also across languages. For an analysis of SQUAT-minimizers as downward entailing quantifiers that express semantic sentential negation see De Clercq (2011).

  4. According to Giannakidou (1998:106), an operator is veridical just in case Op p→p is logically valid. Otherwise the operator is non-veridical. Negation is antiveridical, as Op p→¬p is logically valid.

  5. Some of these diagnostic tests are explicitly credited to a number of other scholars in Vallduví (1994). In particular, (19a) is related to Zanuttini’s (1991) work, and (19b) to Horn (1972), Hoeksema (1983), Zanuttini (1987, 1991) and Quer (1993). Finally, (19d) is attributed to Laka (1990, 1993).

  6. Differences exist among NC languages with respect to whether n-words can appear in non-negative contexts: while in some NC languages such as Catalan, n-words often occur in non-negative contexts with a non-negative meaning, they only marginally do so in Spanish. In Romanian or French, by contrast, n-words cannot appear in non-negative contexts at all.

  7. See also Espinal (2000), who builds on Vallduví’s (1994) tests to show that Catalan and Spanish n-words display an ambiguous behaviour: they behave like negative universal quantifiers in some contexts, but as non-negative existential quantifiers in some others. She suggests that they may be analysed as weak numeral quantifiers that encode a 〚0〛 meaning and are underspecified for quantificational force.

  8. Both Vallduví (1994) and Espinal (2000) mention the same effect for the negative particle ni ‘not even’, which makes it possible for Catalan and Spanish minimizers to be used in isolation and in pre-verbal position, and to be modified by almost and absolutely.

  9. Penka (2007:7–9) discusses Klima’s (1964) tests showing that what they are really sensitive to is whether negation takes widest scope. Penka (2007:11), following Acquaviva (1997), assumes sentential negation to take scope above the event that the verb expresses.

  10. See also Bech (1955/1957), Jacobs (1980, 1982 and 1991), and Rullmann (1995).

  11. Temmerman (2012) assumes a structure with multidominance created by Parallel Merge (Citko 2005, 2011; de Vries 2005, 2009; van Riemsdijk 2006) for English object NQs. In Temmerman’s account, the negative operator Op¬ dominates the existential DP, but is itself not dominated by the VP, which only selects the existential DP.

  12. Matushansky (2006:70) defines m-merger as a morphological operation ‘which results in the head adjunction structure traditionally associated with head movement.’

  13. In this paper the scalar behaviour of minimizers has been attributed to the presence of a Focus even particle in their structure. In addition, it would also be possible to argue that they activate alternatives that need to be interpreted along a pragmatic scale and introduce the implicature that the minimizer is the pragmatically strongest alternative in the context because they are specified with a semantic feature [+σ] (Chierchia 2006:559), which linguistically codifies the need for an enriched interpretation (Chierchia 2006:553–554). As [+σ] is an uninterpretable feature, it would need to be syntactically checked by an interpretable σ operator that can attach to non-veridical operators (including negation, which is antiveridical). Hence, English minimizers are felicitous in contexts containing operators to which a σ operator can attach, but are out in non-negative declarative sentences. The [+σ] feature has recently been argued to be part of n-words in Spanish, Catalan, Romanian and French in Espinal and Tubau (in press). It was already postulated for Catalan n-words in Tubau and Espinal (2012).

  14. Déprez (2005), Espinal and McNally (2007) and Labelle and Espinal (2014) also assume NQs, n-words and PIs to contain a NumP.

  15. For Klein (1998:94) “contrastive negation can be used to replace a degree by one that is thought more applicable (She isn’t A BIT nervous, she’s EXTREMELY nervous).”

  16. Besides the basic form not X but Y, there are, according to McCawley (1991:190), four more types of contrastive negation in English. The five have been listed in (i), (ia–c′) being known as ‘short’ forms and (id, e) as ‘expanded’ forms.

    1. (i)
      figure ap

    In all of them, a minimizer would be interpreted with a non-idiomatic reading (i.e., as a plain indefinite).

    1. (ii)
      figure aq

  17. Alternatively, as suggested by a reviewer, it may be possible that the foci in contrastive negation of the not X but Y type involve Contrastive Focus (Rooth 1992; Kiss 1998; Zubizarreta 1998; Büring 2007, among others), a subtype of Focus that “occurs in a correction, or in a parallel structure (like in ellipsis) where it is juxtaposed directly with another contrastive focus” (Repp 2010:2) rather than an even Focus particle. Deciding which account is superior is beyond the scope of this paper and is left for future research.

  18. As in negative contexts English minimizers may behave as negative polarity items that are dependent on a structurally higher negation, it could be argued that such a dependency is mediated by Agree (Chomsky 1995 and subsequent work) between negation and an uninterpretable negative feature, [uNeg], in the minimizer. In order to explain why minimizers can occur in non-negative contexts, however, it would have to be further assumed (as Espinal and Tubau in press do for Romance n-words, for example), that [uNeg] is not an inherent feature of minimizers, but one that can be picked up in the syntax in negative contexts. Such view, nonetheless, cannot handle the parallelism that minimizers show with NQs when they merge with not.

  19. That NegP has flexible merging possibilities is also shown by the fact that it can also specify nouns, adjectives and other categories.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2011-23356), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (2014SGR1013). I thank Gemma Rigau, Mercè Coll and M. Teresa Espinal, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper.

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  1. Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres (Edifici B), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193, Barcelona, Spain

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Tubau, S. On the syntax of English minimizers. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 739–760 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9308-6

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Keywords

  • Minimizers
  • English
  • Negative quantifiers
  • Polarity items
  • Focus particle
  • Negation