double negation (was: Re: Sad translation)

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.