B01

Project Overview

This project investigates how clausal negation (Neg) interacts with the German indefinite quantifier ein. In the German middle field, quantifiers usually show surface scope, but under certain conditions inverse scope becomes available (see Webelhuth 2022). Such inverse scope can also occur when a quantifier is followed by nicht ‘not’, as in Leider steht uns ein Boot nicht zur Verfügung ‘Unfortunately, a boat is not available to us.’ The existence of kein as a Neg+ein realization raises questions about the lexicon–syntax and syntax–semantics interfaces and provides a testing ground for the Neg-Plus hypothesis, which links Neg, word order, and the lexical realization of negation.

Research Questions & Theoretical Framework

Independent support for these scopal relations comes from the fact that ein N nicht can be replaced by kein N: Leider steht uns kein Boot zur Verfügung. The form kein cannot be treated as a simple generalized quantifier; it must decompose into Neg plus ein, since modals can intervene between Neg and ein (Jacobs 1990, Zeijlstra 2011). A pilot corpus study has uncovered many examples showing that German negation is among the operators that do not obey a rigid scope constraint in the middle field. Even negative polarity items (NPIs) may precede their licensing negator: Sie können einer Fliege nichts zuleide tun, … lit. ‘They cannot do harm to a fly …’. The NPI einer Fliege is idiomatic and can appear as keiner Fliege when no other negator is present. Our research focuses on the conditions that license (a) inverse scope between Neg and ein and (b) the realization of Neg+ein as kein versus other surface forms. We will use such NPIs to test whether their interaction with Neg follows the general principles of Neg+ein realization.

Methodologies & Data

The research will address these questions using corpus studies and production experiments. The corpus work will extend the set of relevant examples to allow quantitative analysis, and the production experiments will use a modified production-from-memory task to identify factors that drive the choice between surface vs. inverse scope and between ein N nicht and kein N. In subsequent phases, we will extend the investigation to other languages, including English, which offers a useful comparison to German because of its relatively rigid SVO word order. The project will also employ more advanced experimental methods, in particular visual-world-based language production experiments, to trace the time course of negated-sentence production.