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On the syntax of surprise negation sentences: A case study on expletive negation

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Abstract

Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker “non” (“not”) has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced.

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Notes

  1. For a detailed discussion on the negative polarity items see, among many others, Espinal (1997); Israel (1997); Zeijlstra (2004); Giannakidou and Yoon (2010) and Giannakidou (2011).

  2. The topicalized phrase is signaled by the co-reference with the resumptive clitic -lo in a left dislocated structure (see Cecchetto 1999; Bianchi and Frascarelli 2010); the contrastive focalized phrase is signaled by the uppercase font.

  3. According to DeLancey (1997, 2001) and Aikhenvald (2005), some languages display a specific morpheme to mark the unexpected nature of the information, something shocking or surprising the speaker. For example, Turkish shows the suffix -mis as a mark of unexpectedness. See Rett and Murray (2013) for a semantic analysis of mirativity and Cruschina (2012) for a discussion of Italian cases. For a discussion on Wh-interrogatives with a “surprise” value, see Obenauer (2006).

  4. NRQs seem to be consistently inappropriate when they are employed as answers to questions. I thank the editor for drawing my attention to this fact.

  5. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out another difference between NRQ and Snegs: in the former case the Italian negative marker “non” can be translated in English as “not,” in the latter case this is not possible. This fact further reinforces the idea that the two structures are different (I will examine the nature of this difference in the Sect. 4).

  6. Crucially, the two structures differ grammatically. See Greco (2019b) for a detailed discussion.

  7. See Yoon (2011) and Greco (2017).

  8. In order to adapt this hypothesis to languages displaying a unique morpheme for both standard and expletive negation—such as Italian—it has been proposed that the same negative marker realizes two different negations, Neg1 and Neg2.

    1. (ii)
      figure at

  9. Donati (2000) and Delfitto (2013) pursue a similar idea proposing that EN is a scope-marker of an operator that can be either negative (Delfitto 2013) or focal (Donati 2000).

  10. See Makri (2013) for a criticism to this proposal.

  11. This twofold classification takes into account the distribution of some phenomena, such as the subject-clitic inversion. See the original works for a detailed discussion.

  12. For a similar idea, see Villalba (2004).

  13. This conclusion takes into consideration the pattern with topicalized and focalized phrases in situ as well (Belletti 2001, 2004a, 2004b;). According to Rizzi (1997), those elements display a (covert) movement to the left periphery (see also Calabrese 1992) and, therefore, their incompatibility with Snegs further confirms the centrality of the CP-layer in the Snegs syntactic definition.

  14. For an opposite view, see Cinque (1999) and Rizzi (1990).

  15. According to an anonymous reviewer, in his/her variety of Italian it is possible to have the form “no” in some colloquial sentences that are alike to Snegs:

    1. (iv)
      figure bh

    Unfortunately, this sentence is not fine to my informants or to me. A different linguistic substratum can cause the differences in the grammatical judgments. Future research will shed light on this issue.

  16. This position is one of the two parametrical values proposed by Ouhalla (1990).

  17. See Cinque (1999) and Frascarelli (2000) for an opposite view.

  18. According to the schema in (74), the word order not>subject>verb is the expected one in Snegs since the negative marker dominates the whole TP which host the subject in its specifier position (between negation and the verb).

  19. This observation can also be extended to those cases in which the whole TP is moved to [Spec, FocP]. Consider, for example, strong and weak NPIs in answers to questions (I have to thank an anonymous reviewer for making me think of this case):

    1. (i)
      figure bm

  20. See also López (2009); Gallego (2012) and Richards (2011) and the references therein; see Chesi (2007) for a critical view.

  21. I did not point out other phases like DP, PP, etc. I was only interested in the propositional phases, as referred to in Chomsky (2000). For other types of phases, see Bošković (2002) and Chomsky (2008).

  22. As the editor observed, weak-NPIs can generally be licensed from negations in higher clauses / phrases. This does not seem completely true in Italian. Consider, for example, the weak NPI mai (ever): it cannot be licensed from the higher-clause negation (a), requiring a clause-mate negation to be rescued (b):

    1. (i)
      figure bp

  23. See below for a more detailed discussion.

  24. I leave to the original works the debate on these approaches.

  25. See the original studies for the detailed discussion.

  26. Interestingly, Alonso-Ovalle and Guerzoni (2004) discuss cases in which a singular neg-word represents the short answer to a question. Consider, for example, the following dialog: A: Chi è venuto? (‘Who came?’); B: Nessuno (‘Nobody’). In order to explain the syntactic configuration of B, they propose that Foc° hosts a negative feature that is semantically active but phonologically empty. This would be the reason why neg-words occur in pre-verbal positions without a negative marker. The tight relation between focus and negation catches an aspect presented in my proposal as well.

  27. Consider, for instance, the Irish case. It displays negative complementizers like nach (McCloskey 2001; Duffield 1995):

    1. (i)
      figure cb

  28. I took the following examples from Moro (2003).

  29. See Munn (1993), Kayne (1994) and Johannessen (1998) for a general discussion.

  30. Ross’s (1967) analysis is based on the following contrasts:

    1. (viii)
      1. a.

        John left, and he didn’t even say goodbye.

      2. b.

        John left. And he didn’t even say goodbye.

      3. c.

        John left and. He didn’t even say goodbye.

    See also Kayne (1994) and Progovac (1998, 2003).

  31. In literature this requirement has been contested and reformulated (see, among others, Goodall 1987 and Mayr and Schmitt 2017, and the references therein). I will not deepen here this discussion because it is beyond the aim of this article and I will adopt the standard analysis for coordination.

  32. Italian shows other cases similar to tipo che, such as si che/no che (see Poletto and Zanuttini 2013). I have to thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

  33. This may also be the reason why Italian does not have negative complementizers since complementizers in Italian are often introduced in ForceP, a functional phrase that is merged after the phase-head Foc°.

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Acknowledgements

This article expands on observations first presented in both the poster sessions I participated at the Götttingen Summer School on Negation in the University of Göttingen (Greco and Moro 2015a) and at the 41st IGG in the Università per Stranieri di Perugia in 2015 (Greco and Moro 2015b), and the seminars I gave at the University of Pennsylvania (2016), at the Université de Genève (2016), at the 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics in UCLA (2018) and at the Yale University (2018). Those ideas later flowed into my doctoral dissertation (Greco 2017). I am very grateful to those who attended those events and also to Adriana Belletti, Pier Marco Bertinetto, Cristiano Chesi, Denis Delfitto, Robert Frank, Laurence Horn, Andrea Moro, Massimo Piattelli Palmarini, Cecilia Poletto, Luigi Rizzi, Alessandra Tomaselli, Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini and Hedde Zeijlstra for many helpful observations. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments. Any resistance to their helpful suggestions is obviously mine!

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Greco, M. On the syntax of surprise negation sentences: A case study on expletive negation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 775–825 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09459-6

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