double negatives

This is what comes of those !@#$% time differences! I knew I shouldn't
have gone to sleep at midnight. I'm going for a combined reaction here...

Matt Pearson wrote:

I wrote:

>> 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:
I think the explanation was rather based on Charyan intuition about Denden
than a thorough linguistic analysis. While Denden is singularly free, for
instance in word order, double negatives seem to be really obligatory.

The negative prefix <tau- ~ -tu ~ ta- ~ t@> can also be used to 'negate'
nouns or adjectives, and it can be seen in, for instance, _turantos_,
'nobody', where it is rather fossilized, or _taugyan_ 'boring' which is
opposed to _gyan_ 'interesting'. In its reduplicated form (and also, but
rarely singly) it can also be used to indicated non-agreement: _tautau_
'no' In that light I'm not entirely convinced that it is an 'irrealis' or
'negative mood' marker - but to see it as a kind of 'negative agreement'
marker looks pretty neat. I may go with that.

On the other hand, in sentences without an overt negative subject, there
isn't an optional negative particle, like in Tokana _Me tu uimotiko_, and
the negative prefix in Denden is different from all other verbal affixes
in that it is a prefix, instead of a suffix. The modal affixes/attitudinal
qualifiers all occur in the first suffixal slot. The lack of such an
optional extra negative particle to fill out sentences with a positive
subject and a negated verb makes the agreement theory more difficult
to support as a general rule.

> Incidentally, the similarity between Denden "tau-"/"turantos"
> and Tokana "tu"/"tunton" is pretty striking.  Distant relatives,
> perhaps?  :-)
Perhaps, let's compare the Swadesh list and determine the exacte date of
splitting!

Ed Heil wrote:

> Really?  Based on mental space mechanics a la Gilles Fauconnier, it
> seems very possible for "nobody" to do something -- the something
> occurs in the mental space of the negation.  Perhaps Charyan verbs
> must be marked with a negation marker to be used in negation-spaces at
> all, unlike English verbs, which don't care.
Hmmm. I think I see a parallell between the intuitive, Charyan
explanation, and this explanation. I think it all boils down to the
matter that there's some agreement needed between inherently negative
subjects and the verb: the negation of the subject should be carried over
to the verb. There still remains the conceptual fact that no loving gets
done, because there is not a person who does the loving.

Nik wrote:

>> Perhaps Charyan verbs must be marked with a negation marker to be used
>> in negation-spaces at all, unlike English verbs, which don't care.
> I s'pose that's one way of viewing mandatory redundant negation,
> especially since Charyan seems to use an inflection for negation.
Just what I thought myself.

Ed Heil also wrote:

> 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.
If I interpret this correctly, I think I understand that what Fauconnier
says is rather like what Matt said, namely that the negative marker is
a sort of agreement marker.

> Ugh, that was horrible to write!  And I suspect, awkward to process,
Indeed, yes. This concept of 'spaces' reminds me a lot of my conceptual
model of namespaces in, say, C++... I wonder when the first object-oriented
theory of language will appear, since we've already had a functional
theory of language :-).

> 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.
I've never bought into the notion that a linguistic utterance was in any
way like doing sums ;-).

--

In summary, I think that the obligatory negating of verbs used with
subjects negated by some form of <-tau> NEG is a matter of agreement
marker. The conceptual explanation behind this phenomenon is harder to
find, and while I know what the Charyan people think of it, I'm not sure
they are quite right, either.

A few gratuitous example sentences:

di    luan do          desh     luan do           *turantos luan do
2sMGH love 1sMGH       everyone love  1sMGH        nobody   love 1sMGH
You love me            Everyone loves me           Nobody loves me

di    tau.luan do     ?desh     tau.luan do        turantos tau.luan do
2sMGH NEG.love 1sMGH   everyone NEG.love 1sMGH     nobody   NEG.love 1sMGH
you don't love mei     Everyone doesn't love me    Nobody loves me

di    taluan do        desh     taluan do          turantos tau.taluan do
2sMGH hate   1sMGH     everyone hate   1sMGH       nobody   NEG.hate   1sMGH
You hate me            Everyone hates me           Nobody hates me

Thanks a lot to everyone who helped me straighten this out!


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt