Discourse and Scalar Structure in Non-Canonical Negation
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Date
2009-11-01
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Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
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Abstract
This paper combines two strands of research: (i) the study of the discourse contextual requirements on the use of non-canonical negative forms, and (ii) research on what has recently been termed the “permeable polar membrane” (Horn 2008) of approximative adverbs like English almost and barely. As regards the first, cross-linguistic studies have shown that non-canonical sentential negatives are licensed under particular discourse conditions that relate to information structure (Fretheim 1984, Espinal 1993, Zanuttini 1997, Kaiser 2006, Schwenter 2005, 2006). Regarding the second, it has been observed that the polar component of approximative adverbs is more open to contextual flexibility than their proximal component (see Li 1976, Horn 2002, Schwenter 2002, Amaral 2007 a.o.). In this paper, we focus on the negative readings of two approximative adverbs, Engl. hardly and European Portuguese (henceforth EP) mal ‘barely, hardly,’ and argue that their “strengthened” negative interpretations can be fleshed out in terms of constraints on the discourse structure. In our proposal, we build both on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives and on the scalar meaning of approximative adverbs. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 1, we present the Conjunctive Analysis of approximative adverbs and introduce the canonical and inverted readings of these forms. In section 2, we briefly review the literature on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives. Section 3 details the distribution of the inverted readings of Engl. hardly and EP mal and section 4 proposes the constraints on discourse structure effected by these inverted readings. Section 5 provides concluding remarks.
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Amaral, Patrícia, and Scott Adam Schwenter. 2009. Discourse and scalar structure in non- canonical negation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 35. 367-78.
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