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Published 2018.
While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages, ...
Published 2018.
While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages, Bickerton (1985) claimed, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed 'double negation', where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction -- problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerges from the meaning of their parts -- has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely considered. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.
