This book presents a novel overarching account of negation and negative dependencies, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition, and language change. Negation is a universal property of natural language, but languages can significantly differ in how they express it: there is variation in the form and position of negative elements, the number of manifestations of negative morphemes, and in the restrictions on the use of Negative and Positive Polarity Items. In this volume, Hedde Zeijlstra explores the hypothesis that all known syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical ways of encoding dependencies should be also be attested in the domain of negation, unless they are independently ruled out. He shows that the pluriform landscape of negative dependencies and markers of negation that emerges has broader implications for theories of syntax and semantics and their interface.

About the Author
Hedde Zeijlstra is Professor of English Linguistics and Theory of Grammar at the University of Goettingen, and previously held positions at the universities of Amsterdam and Tubingen, and at MIT. He is an expert on the syntax-semantics interface, and has worked intensively on negation and negative dependencies, including negative concord, negative polarity sensitivity, and positive polarity sensitivity. He has also worked agreement phenomena, as well as tense, modality, and word order constraints. He is the co-author, with Olaf Koeneman, of Introducing Syntax (CUP, 2017).


Book Information
ISBN 9780198833239
Author Hedde Zeijlstra
Format Hardback
Page Count 496
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 866g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 160mm * 30mm