Re: double negation (was: Re: Sad translation)

> Hmm, I'm not sure I buy this explanation.  Maybe the "tau-"
> prefix is really some sort of irrealis (or 'negative mood')
> marker, rather than a true polarity marker.  That's how I
> understand double negation in Tokana, anyway:
Matthias,

I've been promoting your esteemed countryman Gilles Fauconnier's
'mental space theory' here, and I can't resist noting that in that
theory negations and 'irrealis' statements accomplish exactly the same
thing: they specify that the negated or irrealis sentence material
must be in a different 'mental space' than the main sentence material
(a daughter space); in the case of negatives, they specifically block
the focused parts of the negation-space from existing in the 'parent'
space.

So your analysis of double negatives would be correct.  The only
difference between this and a language in which double negatives
really do negate twice (perhaps resulting in a positive) would be that
in such a language, you could not use two successive negatives to
indicate the same negative space; on the contrary, the second negative
would have to create a negation-daughter-space from the original
negation-daughter-space; this second negation space would block the
inclusion of its focused material from the first one; that first one
would contain, as a focus, the link to the focussed material in the
second space which prevents its inclusion in the first; and this would
be construed as blocking from the original parent space any such link,
(and any such lack), and this would, in a roundabout way, compel the
inclusion of the doubly-negated entities in the original space.

Ugh, that was horrible to write!  And I suspect, awkward to process,
which is why double negatives which behave "illogically" (i.e. do not
turn into positives) are so common in natural languages.  It's just
easier.

(This is all assuming, of course, that Mr. Fauconnier is on track. :)


Ed Heil ------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net
"Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything
   that's even _remotely_ true!"           -- Homer Simpson

JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Jul 1999, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
> > > Turantos luan.za  do!
> > > nobody   love.EXP 1sMGH
> > > Nobody has ever loved me!
> >
> > Aya! A real mistake in Denden (and those are hard to
> > make...) I'd better say:
> >
> > turantos tau.luan.za  do!
> > nobody   NEG.love.EXP 1sMGH
> >
> > The first version simply doesn't make sense to a Charyan:
> > how can 'nobody' actually do something positive, like loving.
> > Where there's no-one to do something, nothing gets done, so
> > the verb must be negated.
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure I buy this explanation.  Maybe the "tau-"
> prefix is really some sort of irrealis (or 'negative mood')
> marker, rather than a true polarity marker.  That's how I
> understand double negation in Tokana, anyway:
>
>         Me     tunton euimoti
>         me.ABS nobody FOC-love-NEG
>         "Nobody loves me"
>
> Here, the suffix "-oti" is really a sort of 'negative agreement'
> marker, which indicates the presence of negation somewhere
> else in the sentence (here, the quanifier "tunton").  This suffix
> is sometimes mistaken for a negative marker, however, since it
> frequently occurs without any other over indication of negation
> in the sentence:
>
>         Me     uimotiko
>         me.ABS love-NEG-you.ERG
>         "You don't love me"
>
> Here, I would argue, "-oti" is indicating the presence of
> an 'invisible' marker of negation.  (This is similar to person/
> number agreement morphology on verbs identifying the features
> of a null subject pronoun in 'pro-drop' languages like Italian.)
> In fact, this invisible negative morpheme may be optionally
> expressed as an overt preverbal particle, "tu".  Thus the
> above sentence can be paraphrased as:
>
>         Me     tu  uimotiko
>         me.ABS NEG love-NEG-you.ERG
>         "You don't love me"
>
> Incidentally, the similarity between Denden "tau-"/"turantos"
> and Tokana "tu"/"tunton" is pretty striking.  Distant relatives,
> perhaps?  :-)
>
> Matt.
>