Date
March 28, 2025, Frankfurt, Germany
Description
Negation is universal — it can be expressed in every language. At the same time, languages show impressive variation concerning the expression of negation. Languages exhibit many different types of syntactic markers of negation, but they also mark it in terms of bound morphology or even exclusively by phonological means. Negation can have different semantic effects, it impacts syntactic structure and interacts with many other linguistic phenomena, e.g. word order variation, focus marking, question formation, quantification or scrambling.
This workshop focuses on the manifoldness of expressing negation across languages and asks what the different syntactic realizations of negation across languages have in common and what they can ultimately tell us about the functional makeup of sentences cross-linguistically.
More concretely, the following questions arise:
- How is negation expressed cross-linguistically and to what extent can the different ways to realize negation be interpreted as different expressions of the same functional structure?
- What do agreement phenomena and negative concord reveal in this respect?
- What does negation share with other functional categories or operators and what is specific to negation?
- In which way does negation marking interact with other syntactic operations and how does it influence the way or form in which other elements appear in the sentence?
- What is the role of lexical elements whose occurrence is only licenced in the context of negation?
We invite contributions from all subfields of generative linguistics, addressing these and other questions relating to the analysis of negation cross-linguistically.