Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T20:49:46.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unacceptable grammars? an eye-tracking study of English negative concord

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

FRANCES BLANCHETTE  and
CYNTHIA LUKYANENKO Open the ORCID record for CYNTHIA LUKYANENKO [Opens in a new window]
FRANCES BLANCHETTE*
Affiliation:
Penn State
CYNTHIA LUKYANENKO
Affiliation:
George Mason University
*
†Address for correspondence: Frances Blanchette, Center for Language Science, Penn State, University Park, PA 16802. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the ‘she answered nothing’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types.

Keywords

American Englishdouble negationeye-tracking while readingexperimental syntaxmetalinguistic negationnegative concordlinguistic variationpragmaticsprocessing in context
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 1 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

A subset of these findings were presented at the 2019 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. We gratefully acknowledge Katherine Muschler for her assistance running the study, Karen Miller for lending us her equipment, and the support of Penn State’s Center for Language Science. We are also grateful for comments and questions from three anonymous reviewers and our colleagues Laurel Brehm and Hossein Karimi, which have made this paper better.

References

references

Auwera, J., & Alsenoy, L. (2016). On the typology of Negative Concord. Studies in Language , 40, 473–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Lme4: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1–10. Online <https://github.com/lme4/lme4pureR>..>Google Scholar
Biberauer, T., & Zeijlstra, H. (2012). Negative Concord in Afrikaans: filling a typological gap. Journal of Semantics , 29, 345–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchette, F. (2013). Negative Concord in English. Linguistic Variation , 13, 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchette, F. (2015). English Negative Concord, Negative Polarity and Double Negation . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center.Google Scholar
Blanchette, F. (2017). Micro-syntactic variation in English Negative Concord. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchette, F., & Nadeu, M. (2018). Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites. Journal of Pragmatics , 129, 123–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchette, F., Nadeu, M., Yeaton, J., & Déprez, V. (2018). English Negative Concord and Double Negation: the division of labor between syntax and pragmatics. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 3(53), 1–15.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: a critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods , 41(4), 977–990.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Collins, C., & Postal, P. (2014). Classical NEG raising: an essay on the syntax of negation . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Déprez, V, Tubau, S., Cheylus, A., & Espinal, M. T. (2015). Double Negation in a Negative Concord language: an experimental investigation. Lingua , 163, 75–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drenhaus, H., Saddy, D., & Frisch, S. (2005). Processing negative polarity items: when negation comes through the backdoor. In Kepser, S. & Reis, M. (eds.), Linguistic evidence: empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives (pp. 145–165). Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P. E. (2010). Uses of eye-tracking data in second language sentence processing research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , 30, 149–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Espinal, M. T., & Prieto, P. (2011). Intonational encoding of Double Negation in Catalan. Journal of Pragmatics , 43, 2392–2410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Espinal, M. T., Tubau, S., Borrás-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2016). Double Negation in Catalan and Spanish: interaction between syntax and prosody. In Larrivée, P. & Lee, C. (eds.), Negation and polarity: experimental perspectives (pp. 145–176). Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, H. J., Sanford, A. J., & Leuthold, H. (2008). Eye-movements and ERPs reveal the time course of processing negation and remitting counterfactual worlds. Brain Research, 1236, 113–125.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fischler, I., Bloom, P., Childers, D., Roucos, S. E., & Perry, N. W. (1983). Brain potentials related to stages of sentence verification. Psychophysiology, 20, 400–409.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fraundorf, S. (2017). Psycholing: R functions for common psycholinguistic and cognitive designs. Online <https://github.com/sfraundorf/psycholing>.Google Scholar
Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (2011). Quantifiers undone: reversing predictable speech errors in comprehension. Language , 87, 158–171.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Geurts, B. (1998). The mechanisms of denial. Language, 74, 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giannakidou, A. (1998). Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giannakidou, A. (2000). Negative … Concord? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory , 18, 457–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, P., Hendrick, R., Johnson, M., & Lee, Y. (2006). Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: evidence from eye tracking during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 32(6), 1304–1321.Google ScholarPubMed
Green, L. (2002). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, L. (2014). Force, focus and negation in African American English. In Zanuttini, R. & Horn, L. R. (eds.), Micro-syntactic variation in North American English (pp. 115–142). New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, L., & Zanuttini, R. (1996). Negative Concord in West Flemish. In Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (eds.), Parameters and functional heads (pp. 117–179). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Herburger, E. (2001). The Negative Concord puzzle revisited. Natural Language Semantics, 9, 233–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, L. (1989 [2001]). A natural history of negation. Chicago: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Horn, L. (2010). Multiple negation in English and other languages. In Horn, L. (ed.) The expression of cognitive categories: expression of negation (pp. 117–148). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, O. (1917). Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Høst.Google Scholar
Juhasz, B. J., White, S. J., Liversedge, S. P., & Rayner, K. (2008). Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34(6), 1569–1579.Google ScholarPubMed
Kaup, B., Lüdtke, J., & Zwaan, R. A. (2007). The experiential view of language comprehension: How is negation represented? In Schmalhofer, F. & Perretti, C. A. (eds.), Higher level language processes in the brain: inference and comprehension processes (pp. 255–288). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Kaup, B., Yaxley, R., Madden, C. J., Zwaan, R. A., & Lüdtke, J. (2007). Experiential simulations of negated text information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(7), 976–990.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keren, E.-H. (2015). From negative polarity to negative concord – Slavic footprints in the diachronic change of Hebrew meʔuma, klum, and sum davar. Journal of Jewish Languages, 3, 183–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladusaw, W. A. (1979). Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations . Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas. Published, New York: Garland (1980).Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, L. (1997). English with an accent . London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Matuschek, H., Kliegl, R., Vasishth, S., Baayen, H., & Bates, D. (2017). Balancing Type 1 error and power in linear mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 94, 305–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, T. (1998). Social mobility and the decline of Multiple Negation in Early Modern English. In Fisiak, J. and Krygier, M. (eds.), Advances in English historical linguistics (1996) (pp. 263–291). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nieuwland, M. S., & Kuperberg, G. R. (2008). When the truth is not too hard to handle: an event-related potential study on the pragmatics of negation. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1213–1218.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noh, E.-J., Choo, H., & Koh, S. (2013). Processing metalinguistic negation: evidence from eye-tracking experiments. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orenes, I., Beltrán, D., & Santamaría, C. (2014). How negation is understood: evidence from the visual world paradigm. Journal of Memory and Language , 74, 36–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orenes, I., Moxey, L., Scheepers, C., & Santamaría, C. (2016). Negation in context: evidence from the visual world paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(6), 1082–1092.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parker, D., & Phillips, C. (2016). Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory. Cognition, 157, 321–339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Phillips, C., Wagers, M. W., & Lau, E. F. (2011). Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. In Runner, J. (ed.), Experiments at the interfaces (Syntax & Semantics, Vol. 37). Bingley: Emerald Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plato, (1937 [c.360 bc]). The Sophist, Jowett., trans. B. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Prieto, P., Borràs-Comes, J., Tubau, S., & Espinal, M. T. (2013). Prosody and gesture constrain the interpretation of double negation. Lingua, 131, 136–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Puskás, G. (2012). Licensing Double Negation in NC and non-NC languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory , 30, 611–649.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2017). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing: Vienna. Online<http://www.R-project.org>>Google Scholar
Rayner, K. (1994). Eye movements during skilled reading. In Ygge, J. & Lennerstrand, G. (eds.), Eye movements in reading (pp. 205–218). New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Rayner, K. (2009). Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(8), 1457–1506.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reinhart, T. M. (1976). The syntactic domain of anaphora. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Schiller, N. O., van Lenteren, L., Witteman, J., Ouwehand, K., Band, G. P. H., & Verhagen, A. (2017). Solving the problem of double negation is not impossible: electrophysiological evidence for the cohesive function of sentential negation. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 32(2), 147–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, J. (2001). Negative concord in the Old and New World: evidence from Scotland. Language Variation and Change , 13, 109–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terry, J. M., Hendrick, R., Evangelou, E., & Smith, R. L. (2010). Variable dialect switching among African American children: inferences about working memory. Lingua , 120, 2463–2475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesan, G., Johnson, B. W., & Crain, S. (2012). How the brain responds to any: an MEG study. Brain & Language, 120, 66–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tettamanti, M., Manenti, R., Della Rosa, P. A., Falini, A., Perani, D., Cappa, S. F., & Moro, A. (2008). Negation in the brain: modulating action representations. NeuroImage , 43, 358–367.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thornton, R., Notley, A., Moscati, V., & Crain, S. (2016). Two negations for the price of one. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics , 45, 1–30.Google Scholar
Tian, Y., & Breheny, R. (2016). Dynamic pragmatic view of negation processing. In Larrivée, P. & Lee, C. (eds.), Negation and polarity: experimental perspectives (pp. 21–44). Heidelberg: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tian, Y., Ferguson, H., & Breheny, R. (2016). Processing negation without context – why and when we represent the positive argument. Language, Cognition, & Neuroscience, 31(5), 683–698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tortora, C., & Den Dikken, M. (2010). Subject agreement variation: support for the configurational approach. Lingua , 120, 1089–1108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vasishth, S., Brüssow, S., Lewis, R. L., & Drenhaus, H. (2008). Processing polarity: how the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical. Cognitive Science, 32, 685–712.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wason, P. C. (1959). The processing of positive and negative information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11, 92–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, W., & Christian, D. (1976). Appalachian speech . Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W., & Fasold, R. (1974). The study of social dialects in American English. New York: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Xiang, M., Dillon, B., & Phillips, C. (2009). Illusory licensing effects across dependency types: ERP evidence. Brain & Language, 108, 40–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Xiang, M., Grove, J., & Giannakidou, A. (2013). Dependency-dependent interference: NPI interference, agreement attraction, and global pragmatic inferences. Frontiers in Psychology 4, article 708. Online <https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00708>.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zanuttini, R. (1997). Negation and clausal structure: a comparative study of Romance languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, H. (2004). Sentential negation and negative concord . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, H. (2008). On the syntactic flexibility of formal features. In Biberauer, T. (ed.), The limits of syntax (pp. 143–174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar