Negation and Negative Dependencies

This book presents a novel overarching account of negation and negative dependencies, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition, and language change. Negation is a universal property of natural language, but languages can significantly differ in how they express it: there is variation in the form and position of negative elements, the number of manifestations of negative morphemes, and in the restrictions on the use of Negative and Positive Polarity Items. In this volume, Hedde Zeijlstra explores the hypothesis that all known syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical ways of encoding dependencies should be also be attested in the domain of negation, unless they are independently ruled out. He shows that the pluriform landscape of negative dependencies and markers of negation that emerges has broader implications for theories of syntax and semantics and their interface.

Hedde Zeijlstra, Professor of English Linguistics and Theory of Grammar, University of Göttingen

Hedde Zeijlstra is Professor of English Linguistics and Theory of Grammar at the University of Göttingen, and previously held positions at the universities of Amsterdam and Tübingen, and at MIT. He is an expert on the syntax-semantics interface, and has worked intensively on negation and negative
dependencies, including negative concord, negative polarity sensitivity, and positive polarity sensitivity. He has also worked agreement phenomena, as well as tense, modality, and word order constraints. He is the co-author, with Olaf Koeneman, of Introducing Syntax (CUP, 2017).