Publications
Chosen filters:
Chosen filters:
Guahiboan negation: ascription and existence University of Antwerp
Quirky negative concord University of Antwerp
This paper explores the interaction between connective negation ('neither ... nor') and negative concord, an issue that has not received much attention. It looks at different 'negative concord' languages, viz. Croatian, Spanish, and French. The approach is synchronic; the data come from existing descriptions and from native speaker judgments. The paper describes the many idiosyncrasies but also lays bare some of the similarities.
Connective negation and negative concord in Balto-Slavic University of Antwerp
Phasal polarity: warnings from earlier research University of Antwerp
How to do words with 'things' University of Antwerp
In the Tupi-Guarini languages the ancestral 'thing' word has developed a fair number of grammatical uses, either on its own or together with other material. The paper surveys these uses and their diachronies, with respect to both general issues of grammaticalization from a 'thing' source or to debates specific to TupiGuarani languages. We first survey pronominal uses (indefinite, interrogative, and negative) and discourse particle uses. Then we ...
Postverbal negation University of Antwerp
The paper sketches the state of affairs of our understanding of postverbal negation. It departs from the typological finding that there is a cross-linguistic preference for a negator to precede the verb. Nevertheless, a sizable proportion of the world’s languages adhere to a pattern with a negator following the verb, and such negators are typically morphologically bound. The existence of this pattern, unfavorable from a functional perspective, ...
Standard negation in Chibchan University of Antwerp
This paper surveys the form and the position of the negators of declarative verbal main clauses in the Chibchan languages. It attempts to describe the similarities and the differences, and it ventures hypotheses about the diachrony, primarily with an appeal to the Jespersen and Negative Existential Cycles. It sketches if and how the negators fit more general areal patterning, in particular, the Columbian Central American linguistic area.
The typology of negation University of Antwerp
Such similatives: a cross-linguistic reconnaissance University of Antwerp
This paper is a preliminary exploration of the semantic and formal properties of the English word such and some of its counterparts in other languages. The proposal is that such words are ‘demonstrative similatives’ (or, equivalently, ‘similative demonstratives’), i.e., their meanings lie at the intersection of the semantic dimensions of similarity and demonstration. We show that this kind of classification is straightforward for languages like ...