Page 432 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act
Theory
Guyanese
mo pa ka dromi
me NEG FUT sleep:'I shan't sleep.'
(12c)
congruent verb. Generalization of pas as a neg particle givesye ne voispas. NPIScan thus occur only in negative contexts. But discontinuous constructs like ne.. .pas are marked constructions and tend to be avoided: only 17 percent of languages (usually of the SVO type) have this kind of NEG. Actually, the preverbal, weakly articulated part of the French negative construct (i.e., [n]) is redundant: je ne vais pas>colloquial je vais pas. The NPI may also be emphatically reinforced— pas > pas du tout, literally 'not at all,' and become in its turn redundant—pas du tout>du tout. See, for instance:
Croyez-vous queje vous blame? Du tout. (13) 'Do you believe that I blame you? No, I don't.'
Schematically the so-called 'NEG cycle' may be rep- resented as follows (see Schwegler 1988):
ne + verb > ne4-verb +pas > verb +pas
( >pas du tout > du tout). (14)
The same holds true also for English and German where 'not' and nicht derive from naught, nought <OE na-wiht and OHG niowiht 'no-whit, no-thing':
English (15) ne+verb> ne+ verb4-not>verb+not;
German
ni/en/ne+verb >ni/en/ne 4-verb4-niht>verb4-nicht.
As for the raising of NEG to preverbal position see example (12) from Creole languages.
5. PragmaticsofNegation
As may be argued from the historical evolution sket- ched in the previous section, pragmatics plays an important role in NEGstrategies, especially because of the wish to reinforce the negative value of the utter- ance. NPIS like pas, goutte, etc., are emphasizing expressions which originally served to underline the negative meaning of the sentence and then became grammaticalized as NEGmarkers. For example, in English 'I heard what you said'—'The deuce you did!' ('You didn't at all') (Jespersen 1917:33).
As the 'natural' position of NEGis the preverbal one, so that the verb lies in the scope of NEG, it is odd that there are languages like German, Brazilian Portuguese, some Italian dialects, etc., which have postverbal NEG.
The origin of German nicht and its postverbal pos- ition have already been discussed. In Brazilian Por- tuguese or other Romance traditions:
There is a clear tendency to place the NEG marker (< French pas, postponed to the inflected verbal form—see (10b)) before the verb and also before tense and aspect markers (pe.ka). Exactly the same trend has been observed for Maghreb Arabic dialects, where the discontinuous NEG ma+verb+-s tends to be replaced by a simple preverbal NEG. It may be inferred from this evolution that Jespersen was right in talking of (1917:5) 'a natural tendency, also for the sake of clearness, to place the negative first, or at any rate as soon as possible, very often immediately before the particular word to be negatived (generally the verb),' in other words to construct negative sentences with the verb (i.e., the core of the predication) in the 'scope' of NEG(see Sect. 1). Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are on the way to reintroducing preverbal NEGand English children may during their learning period pro- duce sentences with preverbal NEG, for example, 'No wipe fingers' though their mother language has NEG after the inflected verbal form ('I do not wipe my
fingers'). The same has been noticed also for Japanese adults learning English: though Japanese hasNEG suffixed to the verb at the sentence end, as in (lOf), students in the first stages of their learning process formed sentences like 'I no want many children,' 'I no like English,' and also 'He don't like it' where 'don't' is clearly perceived as a negation particle, simply a variant of'no' (see ain't, above).
Also, from a diachronic point of view, postverbal NEG usually seems to imply preverbal NEG, via dis- continuous NEG. French pas derives from Latin pas- su(m) 'step.' Together with other Romance NEG particles like French goutte 'drop,' Italian mica 'crumb,' Catalan cap (< Latin capu(t)) 'head,' Sur- silvan Romantsch buc(a) (< Latin buccd) 'cheek,' etc.,pas represents a clear instance of a lexeme having developed into a NEG marker (first in postverbal pos- ition). The original meaning of pas (goutte, cap, etc.) wasn't at all negative—it was the 'measure' object of the verb occurring in postverbal position, as expected in an SVO language like Late (Vulgar) Latin, for example non vado possum 'I do not proceed a step' ( > French [je] ne vais pas); non video guttarn 'I do not see a tear,' meaning 'I'm so blind that I can't even see the tears in my eyes' (> French [je] ne vois goutte). The same evolution is found in the above-mentioned Arabic discontinuous NEG: ma-katabuu-S (Cairo Ara- bic) 'they did not write,' where the second NEGform derives from the indefinite accusative say^ari) 'thing'—thus 'not + verb+a thing.'
By occurring mostly in sentences with negative meaning, terms likepar, goutte,say^(an), etc., assumed negative value per se and became negative polarity items (NPIS), no longer bound to a semantically
( = 1 0 above) O Joao (nao) come peixe n&o.
(16a)
410
Compare also the very similar Afrikaans construction:
Jan eet me vis nie
J. eats NEG fish NEC
(16b)
where the first NEG comes after the verb, according to the Germanic pattern.