Preproofversion.

ToappearinPierreLarriveandChungmin
Lee(Eds).NegationandPolarity.Experimentalandcognitiveper
spectives.Springer.

TheMarkednessofDoubleNegation
1

PierreLarrive
NormandieUniversit,Unicaen,CRISCO(EA4255)

0.Abstract
IsDoubleNegation(DN)amarkedinterpretationwithrespectto
Negative Concord (NC) as universally assumed? This is what is
verifiedinthisarticlethatreportsonactualusageinFrenchand
English. It investigates three configurations with multiple
clausemate negative expressions (clausal negator with a n
word,twonwords,andtwoclausalnegators).Thedataisana
lysedfortherelativeproportionofNCandDNreadings,andfor
identifiable triggers of DN. The predictions if DN is marked are
thatNCasadefaultshouldoccurevenincontextsbiasedforDN,
and that specific collocations and contextual factors trigger DN
readings. Current work leads to the expectation that the deter
minantfactorforDNisanInformationStructure(IS)configura
tion,inwhichtherejectednegativeclauseisoldinformationex
plicitly mentioned in the antecedent context and the rejecting
negatorisdiscoursenew.Bothpredictionsaresupportedbythe
data:contextsbiasedinfavourofDNstilldisplayNCinterpreta
tionsinuptohalfofthecorpusoccurrences;andDNisstrongly
correlatedtotheexpectedISstructure(upto84%),andinother
cases to recurrent collocations (up to 46%). The findings
demonstrate that DN is marked as the result not of a macro

Iwishtothankthecontributorstothisvolumeanditsrefereesfortheirconstructive
commentsonthischapter;anearlierversionalsobenefitedfromfeedbackbyPatrick
Duffley,VroniqueLenepveuandtheparticipantstoaseminarheldinNeuchtelonHallo
ween2013.Responsibilityforanyshortcomingshouldnotbeattributedtonobodyelsebut
me.

parameter,butofapsycholinguisticbiasthatfavoursNCasade
fault interpretation for negative dependencies due to greater
easeofprocessing,inlinewithrecentpsycholinguisticresults.
Keywords:negativedependency,DoubleNegation,negative
concord,informationstructure,corpusstudies,macro
parameter

1.Introduction
It is universally assumed that the Double Negation interpretation by
which two negative markers cancel their value to yield a positive interpretation is marked (i.a. Corblin and Tovena 2001, Espinal and Prieto
2011, Horn 2001, Huddlestone 2010, Moscati 2006, Puskas 2012,
Swart 2010, Zeijlstra 2004). This is allegedly the case in so-called Negative Concord languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, where the
concord relation would be the default interpretation for multiple negative expressions sharing the same structural clausal scope. Even where
concord relations are believed to be disallowed as in standard English,
Dutch and German, Double Negation interpretation of sequences such
as (1) and (2) would continue to be marked.
(1)
(2)

Nobody is doing nothing.

John is not doing nothing.

Markedness is generally interpreted in terms of formal and semantic

complexity, lower frequency, and greater processing costs. More linguistic marking is needed for DN in terms of prosodic and syntactic
cues (Espinal and Prieto 2011, Horn 2001, Puskas 2012). Lesser frequency is documented by Huddlestone (2010: 140) who finds 4% of
Double Negation for clauses with multiple n-words in Afrikaans.
Greater processing costs are assumed on the basis that triple negation
is virtually unattested (Corblin 1996).
One potential explanation for DN markedness is that it involves a specific informational partition where one negative sequence
is discourse-old and rejected by a discourse-new negative, as suggested

by various observations and from Puskas work (2012, 2009, 2006).

However, in fact, except for quantitative data from Huddlestone on
Afrikaans, little empirical support has been established for the idea of
DN markedness, or that its markedness is a consequence of Information Structure partitioning. Such evidence is what this paper provides, by analysing data from actual usage. Corpora are searched for
configurations with multiple clause-mate negatives in French and in
English, respectively NC and DN languages. The analysis of the data
focuses on the preponderance of NC and DN readings and the role of
triggers such as Information Structure, to establish the markedness of
DN.
The study is presented as follows. First, I spell-out the assumptions of Double Negation markedness and the reasons to believe that
such markedness relates to Information Structure partitioning. I then
present the method to test these assumptions and analyse the French
and English corpus data by looking at the relative weight of the DN
reading and its relation to Information Structure. The consequences of
these data for the understanding of Double Negation and for its cognitive foundation are articulated in the concluding discussion.

2.ThemarkednessofDoubleNegationreadings
All natural languages are found to express negation. Multiple negative
expressions sharing the same clausal scope entertain two possible types
of dependencies. One is Negative Concord, by which each of these expressions contributes to the overall negative interpretation of the
proposition. The other is Double Negation, where each negative cancels the other out to imply a positive proposition. Both are illustrated
by the following French example:
(3)

Personne ne fait rien.

Nobody is doing anything (NC)
Nobody is doing nothing, i.e. Everyone is doing something (DN)

(3) can be interpreted with a Negative Concord reading, where no action is taking place. This can be paraphrased by the second negative
being replaced by a negative polarity item.

(4)

Personne ne fait quoi que ce soit.

Nobody is doing anything

The example can also have a Double Negation interpretation, such that
some action is indeed taking place. This can be disambiguated by
strong focus on one of the negatives, cleft structures and question/answer pairs.
(5)
(6)
(7)

a.

Personne ne fait rien.

Nobody is doing nothing, i.e. Everyone is doing something (DN)
a.
Il ny a personne qui ne fait rien.
There is nobody who is doing nothing,
i.e. Everyone is doing something (DN)
a.
Qui ne fait rien ?
Mais personne.
Who is doing nothing?
Noone is. i.e. Everybody is doing something (DN)

By contrast, only one interpretation is believed to be allowed by the

French equivalent of (2).
(8)

Jean ne fait pas rien.

* Jean isnt doing anything (NC)
Jean isnt doing nothing, i.e. Jean is doing something (DN)

The co-occurrence of clausal negator pas not with a n-word like rien
nothing and personne nobody is assumed to exclude Negative Concord interpretations in European French (inter alia Biberauer and Roberts 2011, Corblin and Tovena 2001, Dprez 2000: 261, Giannakidou
2007: 350, Muller 1984: 64-65, Rowlett 1998: 143ss, de Swart 2010:
156). No paraphrase could therefore be expressed by replacing the nword with a NPI.
(9)

Jean ne fait pas quoi que ce soit.

Jean is not doing anything (NC)

Paraphrase is rather found in the diagnostics of DN that are strong focus on one of the negatives, cleft structures and question/answer pairs.

(5)

b.

(DN)
(6)
b.
(7)

b.

Jean ne fait pas rien.

Jean isnt doing for nothing, i.e. Jean is doing something
Il ny a rien que Jean ne fait pas.
There is nothing that Jean isnt doing.,
i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)
Quest-ce que Jean ne fait pas ?
Rien du tout.
What is John not doing?
Nothing at all., i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)

Double Negation is the interpretation that also obtains when the same
scope is not shared by negative expressions (Larrive 2004: 169 i.a.), as
in the following where a clausal negation pas and personne cancel out the
local morphological and constituent scope negative.
(10)

(11)

Personne ne sinquite pour rien.

* Nobody worries for any reason (NC)
Nobody worries for no reason,
i.e. Everyone worries for a reason (DN)
Ce nest pas impossible.
* Its impossible (NC)
Its not impossible, i.e. Its possible (DN)

For ambiguous sentences with multiple negative expressions

sharing the same clausal scope as in French (3), Negative Concord appears to be the default interpretation. Markedness is universally believed to characterise the DN interpretation, as demonstrated by the
following citations:
Negationisthemarkedmemberofthepair<affirmation,negation>,butthe
unmarkedmemberofthepair<(single)negation,doublenegation>.(DeSwart2010:
34)

Justas(single)negationismarkedinrelationtoaffirmation,sotooistheoccurrence
ofdoublenegation(whethersyntacticorsemantic)inrelationtotheoccurrenceof
singlenegation.(Huddlestone2010:16)

Doublenegationreadingsareinsteadmoredifficulttocheck,sincetheyarealways
marked.(Moscati2006:136)

6
WestartthisdiscussionfromtheassumptionthatDNissemanticallymarkedwith
respecttosinglenegation,anditissemanticallymarkednotonlybecauseDNis
unexpectedinNClanguages(i.e.,languagesinwhichmultipleexpressionsof
negationgiverisetoasinglenegationreading),butalsobecauseDNisexpressed
lessfrequentlythansinglenegation.(EspinalandPrieto2011:2404)

However,DoubleNegationinnaturallanguageisextremelyrare.Notonlyisithard
togiverisetoDNreadingsinNegativeConcordlanguages,butalsoinlanguagesthat
lackNegativeConcord,suchasStandardDutch,StandardGerman,orthe
Scandinavianlanguages,constructionswithtwonegativeelementsarehardtofind.
(Zeijlstra2004:58)

Doublenegation,inturn,ismarkedinrelationtosinglenegationforsimilarreasons.
Firstly,doublenegation,whetherthesyntacticdoublenegationobservedinNC
languages,orthesemanticdoublenegationobservedinDNlanguages,involvesmore
morphologicalcomplexitythansinglenegation,asthereismultiplemarkingof
negation.Secondly,doublenegationinDNlanguagesismarkedintermsof
(pragmatic)meaning.(Huddlestone2010:8)

DNoccursinspecialcontexts(Puskas2012:612)

Thedoublenegationreadingitselfrequiresveryspecialconditionstoarise,which
leadsonetothinkthatonenegationperclauseisthedefaultcase.(Corblinand
Tovena2001:98)

Claims of DN markedness rely on four types of arguments, having to

do with formal complexity, interpretation, preponderance and triggers.
First, the DN interpretation typically requires more marking
than its positive equivalent: two negators are involved in (2) and none
in John did something.
That formal complexity makes DN fall under the Gricean maxim of manner according to which an unexpected way to put things
leads the hearer to search for an unexpected interpretation (or following Levinson 2000s M-principle, what is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation). And indeed, the DN interpretation is
semantically complex in that it is not straightforwardly identical to its
positive logical correspondent. In his extensive discussion of cases
such as (10), Horn (2001: 296-308) shows that a statement such as Its
not impossible that Bill is lying is a more attenuated judgment than Its possible that Bill is lying. This is unexpected under logical analysis for which
a proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negation (Russell
and Whitehead 1952: 117), and suggests that DN is a marked interpretation in natural languages.
Third, it has been noted that in corpora, DN readings are comparatively rarer than NC: Huddlestone cites 4% of multiple n-words

clauses such as (1) and (2) with DN readings in her Afrikaans corpus
(2010: 140). This supports the claim in the citations above that DN is
indeed rare, and therefore more marked than NC interpretation.
Finally, and a possible explanation of the third point, DN requires explicit contextual triggers in a way that NC does not, maybe
because it is harder to process as suggested by Francis Corblin (i.a.
1996). A major trigger of DN is accentual focus (Corblin 1996, Dprez
2000, Espinal and Prieto 2011, Falaus 2007a,b, Larrive 2004: 162-165,
Puskas 2012, 2009, 2006). Focus may be realised by various prosodic
factors such as pause, duration, intonation contour and pitch range
(Krahmer, Swerts, Theune and Weegels 2002), and may be supported
by gestural elements (Prieto, Borrs-Comes, Tubau and Espinal 2013).
The contradiction contour is demonstrated through perception experiments to be a key factor in bringing about Double Negation interpretation by Espinal and Prieto (2011) and by Espinal, Tubau, BorrsComes and Prieto (this volume). This seems intuitively correct. As
mentioned, the DN reading of (5a) calls for focus on one of the nwords:
(5)

a.

Personne ne fait rien

and without such focus the sequence is most likely to be interpreted as

NC. Focus on one of the n-words similarly tends to yield DN in the
English equivalent:
(1)

Nobody is doing nothing.

Converging evidence is thus relating double negation and focus.

Triggers of DN include structural factors. A list of such factors
is provided by Corblin, Dprez, de Swart and Tovena (2004), and
comprises question/answer configuration, modification of the n-word
by the equivalent of almost, use of a n-word determiner, and use of nword with a clausal negator. Question/answer pairs as (7) are said to
only have a DN reading, although NC is possible in Catalan as per Espinal and Prieto (2011). Likewise, it is suggested that modification by
presque promotes DN as in (12),
(12)

Personne na presque rien fait.

Nobody did almost nothing

although again this is noted to allow NC in Catalan (Corblin, Dprez,

de Swart and Tovena 2004: 430), a reading also available for (12) as
recognised by the authors and as attested in Larrive (2004: 167). Determiner n-words would favour DN, which would be the only reading
of the following example:
(13)

Aucun enfant na mang aucun gteau. (Corblin, Dprez, de

Swart and Tovena 2004: 425)
No child ate no piece of cake

Configurations such as (13) are however again attested with a NC interpretation (Larrive 2004: 168; see also the discussion by Muller
2005). Finally, the use of a n-word with a clausal negative as in (2) and
(8) would support DN (Corblin, Dprez, de Swart and Tovena 2004:
420; see also Jespersen 1917: 62ff, Payne 1985: 204). While that is true
in one register of European French, many stylistic and regional varieties allow NC for this configuration. The proposed structural triggers
of DN thus at best contribute to a DN reading rather than define it.
A better trigger than structural factors therefore seems to be
found in prosodic focus. However, prosodic factors are not categorical,
as shown by results in Espinal and Prieto (2011) and Espinal, Tubau,
Borrs-Comes and Prieto (this volume), who submit a perception test
to Catalan speakers who are asked to identify the reading of question/answer configurations of the type Who didnt eat dessert? No
one.. Unlike English and French, the configuration is ambiguous in
Catalan between NC and DN, but is expected to be DN when the answer n-word is bearing a contradictory contour. Even in the maximally
favourable DN context of a negative answer bearing a contradictory
contour to a negative question, there are still 32% of subjects who
identified a NC reading. These maximally favourable environments of
question-answer and contradictory contour both relate to Information
Structure (IS). IS concerns the status of the information conveyed by
linguistic material in relation to being accessible to the hearer at that
point of the discourse (for essential references on this, see Prince 1981,
Gundel and Fretheim 1993, Krifka 2007). Accessible information is
discourse-old, it has been mentioned before, and information that has
not been mentioned or cannot be accommodated or inferred as such is

discourse-new. The answer to a question as in (7) thus has discoursenew status with the rest of the proposition being discourse-old.
(7)

a.

(7)

b.

Qui ne fait rien ?

Mais personne.
Who is doing nothing?
Noone is. i.e. Everybody is doing something (DN)
Quest-ce que Jean ne fait pas ?
Rien du tout.
What is John not doing?
Nothing at all., i.e. Jean is doing everything (DN)

The partition between a discourse-new negative answer to a discourseold negative question yielding DN suggest the determining role of IS.
Further indications as to the role of IS are also found by Moscati
(2006: 136ff). His study of negative scope in Italian reports that a nword in a preverbal focus position brings about DN in a language
where normally only one preverbal marker is needed for clausal negation.
(14)

Nessuno non ha capito il problema.

Nobody didnt understand the problem, i.e. Everybody understood it (DN)
The same observation holds for languages with similar structures, such
as Spanish and Sardinian, with the exception again of Catalan. DN is
produced by a n-word in focus position of an otherwise negative sentence, and material in focus is by definition discourse-new (see references and discussion in Chen, Li and Yang 2012), with the rest of the
proposition being discourse-old, confirming the relation between Information Structure and Double Negation interpretation.
IS thus seems to be the level at which DN readings are defined.
If correct, this would explain why neither syntactic nor prosodic factors are absolutely determinant. It would also account for the fact that
DN is marked as it would associate to a particular configuration with
one negative being discourse-new and the other discourse-old along
with the rest of the clause.
The defining role of IS for DN readings is explored by Puskas
(2012, 2009, 2006). Within a Minimalist perspective, she considers cas-

10

es such as Personne ne fait rien (3) and Jean ne fait pas rien (8). (8) yields a
Double Negation interpretation as a matter of course in normative registers of European French. This associates to strong accentual focus on
pas in the contexts where it is denied that Jean does nothing (the case
where it is the n-word that is focused is not considered). (3) may yield a
Double Negation interpretation, although this need not be the case.
Again, strong accentual focus comes to bear on the negative that rejects the negative proposition, and focus on personne in (3) communicates the denial that someone is doing nothing. This would follow
from the focused item in (3) and (8) being raised in a Verum Focus position to take scope over the whole negative proposition, leading to
negative values cancelling out. (The fact that the n-word is not negative
in itself according to Puskas forces her in cases like (3) to make the
Verum Focus the recipient of the second negative value to ensure cancellation, these theory-internal considerations being orthogonal to our
concerns.) The structure is reminiscent of metalinguistic negation, rather than recursive quantification, as indicated by the H*L prosody also
found with presupposition denial. A second mechanism relating to a
weak DN is proposed (Puskas 2012) on the basis of the Hungarian data
where the clausal negative like pas or the n-word is a Contrastive Focus. The difference would be expressed by the type of focus and intonation, the syntactic position of the second negative which would be
covert in most cases and languages, and the type of alternatives involved (polar reading for strong DN induced by Verum Focus vs. nonexclusive alternatives induced by contrastive topic for weak DN).
Whatever the necessity of weak and strong Double Negation might be,
the analysis does articulate the relation between DN and IS.
Converging indications support the view that Double Negation
is the result of Information Structure configurations, where the rejected negative proposition is discourse-old and the rejecting negator is
discourse-new. To illustrate, the sequence John is not doing nothing with a
DN reading paraphrased by It is not the case that John is doing nothing
would divide into a discourse-old negative proposition John is doing nothing rejected by a discourse-new not. The fact that it would rely on a specific IS configuration would make DN a marked negative dependency
with respect to NC that does not require such a configuration. Clearly,
these proposals need to be put to the empirical test. More must be
known about the relations between IS and DN in actual usage, and
whether indeed DN is marked. A protocol for the study of DN in real

11

usage is proposed in the next section, which also presents the research
results before their significance is discussed in the final section.

3.Corpusevidence
This study is concerned with empirically testing the assumptions that
DN is a marked interpretation, and that markedness arises from a specific IS configuration. These assumptions can be tested in a variety of
ways, and are here verified by a study of actual usage. This choice is
motivated by the fact that usage study provides us with an understanding of the patterns of phenomena. Such an understanding is particularly important for a phenomenon on the triggers of which so little is actually known, as evidenced by incompletely accurate claims made by
existing studies evoked above. The importance is furthered by the fact
that it is usage that is the input for acquisition and that it is therefore
crucial for the cognitive status of a linguistic phenomenon.
The study of DN is conducted by looking at sequences in
French, a Negative Concord language. DN should therefore be a
marked option correlating to particular triggers, hypothesised to be an
IS configuration on the basis of existing studies and available observations. IS is here defined as the status of information conveyed by linguistic material as to whether it is accessible to the hearer at that point
of the discourse (Dryer 1996, Schwenter 2005, Larrive 2012). Because
the impact of IS configuration on DN is what is tested, I select sequences believed to be strongly biased in favour of DN. One such sequence is (8), repeated below.
(8)

Jean ne fait pas rien.

* Jean isnt doing anything (NC)
Jean isnt doing nothing, i.e. Jean is doing something (DN)

Such sequences are generally believed to be DN in European French,

and to exclude NC. The exact string na pas rien ne have-3PS-PR not
nothing was searched for in Google France pages, with the preverbal
negative clitic to exclude regional and register varieties where ne is most
often absent and where NC is a possible reading. If DN is marked, it is
expected that even in favourable contexts, some NC cases could creep
in, and that a proposition such as Il na pas rien fait might in fact be in-

12

terpreted as He didnt do anything some of the time. The other expectation from DN markedness is that it should correlate to identifiable contextual triggers, with a dominant involvement of IS. More specifically, the underlying negative proposition should be discourse-old in
having been explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context, and the rejecting negative to be discourse-new. To repeat, in (8), the propositional negative pas would be new information rejecting the discourse-old
negative proposition Jean ne fait rien John is doing nothing, which
would be expected to have been mentioned explicitly before. While
previously explicit usage is not the only diagnostic of discourse-old status, it is the most tangible manifestation, and therefore, given the notorious difficulties in identifying discourse status of propositional material in actual usage, it is the one that we retain here.
The search for the string na pas rien in March 2013 yielded
445 hits. Each was extracted, and 74 irrelevant cases were excluded.
They concerned manifestly ungrammatical sentences (from e.g. automatic translation), productions from second-language speakers, repeated pages, sequences with items belonging to different sentences or
clauses, and cases of mention as opposed to usage. The 371 relevant
occurrences were analysed for their reading (NC or DN) and for the
explicit presence of the rejected negative proposition in the antecedent
context.
Just over half the occurrences have a DN interpretation, with
186, versus 185 with a NC reading. The NC reading relates to explicit
activation in 39 cases out of 185 (21%), as illustrated below.
(15)

Eh, on est des Musulmans, on na pas d hommes saints , on

a pas de clerg, on na pas rien de tout cela
(http://www.yabiladi.com//fkih-d-un-douar-arrete-pour-24093862.html)
Eh, were Muslims, we dont have holy men, we dont have a
clergy, we dont have nothing of the sort.

where the proposition is introduced in ones own speech. Although

this was not quantified, NC sequences seem to relate to emphatic negation in a number of cases,
(16)

a.

mais si on na pas rien reu comme papier cest mon

cas et que les impots ne sont pas obliges de nous en-

13

b.

voyer un papier comment on fait pour savoir ce quil

faut payer ? (http://forum.aufeminin.com)
but if we havent received nothing in terms of papers
as is my case and the tax office doesnt have to send us
papers, how do we know what is to be paid ?
Un reportage que la police avait bien sr la possibilit
de visionner et qui constituait la meilleure preuve de ce
que notre reporter tait venu faire. Mais elle na pas
rien
voulu
entendre,
ni
voir.
(http://www.lavoixdesallobroges.org)
The report that the police could see and that was the
best proof as to what our reporter was doing. But the
police didnt want to hear or see nothing.

NC readings seem particularly frequent with recurrent expressions

such as navoir pas rien sans rien (not to have nothing without nothing,
49 cases), navoir pas rien fait (not to have done nothing, 14), navoir pas
rien envier (not to have nothing to envy, 10), navoir pas rien chang
(not to have changed nothing, 12), for a total of 85 over 185 (46 %).
The other half of cases has the expected DN reading, with 186
attestations over 371 (50%). The interpretation relates to explicit activation in two thirds of cases (122 out of 186, 66%).
(17)

a.

b.

- gamecube et wii ca na rien a voir..

- La Wii et la Gamecube ont tout en commun, cest
exactement le mme hardware avec plus de mmoire et
des frquences plus levs (~500Mhz vs ~700Mhz),
donc non a na pas rien avoir
(http://www.frandroid.com/applications/57957_fpseun-nouvel-emulateur-psx-bientot-sur-android)
- Gamecube and Wii have nothing to do with each
other
- Wii and Gamecube have everything in common, its
the same hardware with more memory and higher frequency, so, no, they havent got nothing to do with
each other
- oui a expliquerais peut-tre que le SAV nai rien voulu faire.

14

- non () seulement le SAV na pas rien fait, il a bloqu ma xbox avec ce fameu bug. (http://www.logicsunrise.com/forums/topic/40737-aide-sav-xbox-360/)
- Yes, that would maybe explain why the SAV wanted
to do nothing
- No, except the SAV didnt do nothing, it blocked my
Xbox with the well-known bug
Explicit previous mention is often signalled by quotation marks and
reference to an antecedent statement typically by another speaker.
(18)

a.

b.

Locke na pas rien crit en conomie comme vous

dites, (http://bien-vivre-a-ouzouer.over-blog.com/45index.html)
Locke didnt write nothing in economics, as you say
donc non, ce la na pas rien voir de les comparer,
contrairement ce que dit Pierre Waline.
(http://www.hu-lala.org)
So, no, comparing them hasnt got nothing to do
with it, contrary to what Pierre Wamine says.

The 64 non-explicitly activated cases of DN relate in a large majority of

cases to recurrent expressions (55 attestations). Such phrases include
28 rien fait done nothing, 16 rien voir nothing to do with it, 5 (jen
ai) rien faire (lit. (I have) nothing to do (of it), meaning I dont care
about it), 2 rien se mettre (nothing to wear), 2 rien dire (nothing to
say) and 2 rien crit (written nothing). Recurrent expressions are notably more frequent for DN than for NC: the four most frequent
phrases noted for NC represent 46% of NC cases, while they account
for 72% of all DN attestations.
The IS status of the relevant examples of the sequence na pas
rien on Google France in March 2013 is summarised by the following
table.

15

Explicitly
activated

Other

Totals

DN

122

64 (55 with 186

recurrent
expressions)

NC

39

146

185

161

210

371

Table1.DistributionofreadingofnapasrieninGoogleFrance

These results, found to be statistically significant following a chi-square

test, are entirely unexpected in that just over half of cases have a DN
interpretation in a context that is strongly biased in favour of DN. This
supports the view that DN is marked, and that NC is a default option
exercised even in an unfavourable environment. Markedness of DN is
further supported by its relation to the specific trigger of IS configuration. Two-third of DN attestations (66%) relate to the rejected proposition being explicitly activated in the antecedent context, and therefore
accessible to the hearer, i.e. discourse-old. For he remaining third of
DN cases that were not found to have explicitly discourse-old status,
86% are used with recurrent expressions such as having nothing to do with
it, which are arguably accessible to the hearer as well by virtue of being
part of the linguistic common repertoire. The fact that 96% of occurrences (177/186) are found to relate to a specific trigger supports DN
markedness.
The unexpectedly low number of occurrences of DN readings
in a context biased for DN is calling for some confirmation. The study
of configurations exemplified in (8) Jean ne fait pas rien could be ideally
complemented by that in (3) Personne ne fait rien. However, these are
found to have a NC interpretation in usage, and attestations with DN

16

are extremely difficult to find in French (only one attestation being cited by Larrive 2004: 166). Google is a poor search engine for such rare
configurations, and there is as of yet no extensive collection of searchable French non-literary texts. As a DN language, English should have
strongly preponderant DN interpretation for examples such as (1) Nobody is doing nothing, which would allow to check for the intervention of
IS factors. The configuration was searched for through the cooccurrence of nothing and nobody at the maximal distance of 9 words allowed by the search engine of the COCA corpus made available at
Brigham Young University. Of the 480 examples that were returned,
110 were relevant in having the two n-words in the same clause. The
higher proportion of noise in the English (77%) than in the French
(17%) search follows form an exact string not being set and from the
greater distance between the items. Also, cases of coordination were
excluded from the count, as this is a context previously unnoticed in
existing studies that exclusively allows NC readings2. The following can
only mean that the person in question was not going to be disturbed,
and not that she was going to be disturbed by everything and everyone.
(19)

Nobody and nothing was going to disturb her, not while

Daddy was around.

In any event, the relevant 110 occurrences only yielded 6 cases of DN.
Each case involved constituent scope of n-word nothing in the expression for nothing rejected by the other negative expression, as illustrated
below.

Areviewerhowevernotesthataparallelreading,involvingneithercon
cordnordoublenegation,seemspossiblewithconjunction.WhereasNobody
didnothingmightbeseenasequivalenttonobodydidanythinginaNCread
ing,andtoEverybodydidsomethinginaDNreading,thesentenceIwantno
dogsandnocatscanneithermeanIwantnodogsandanycats,norIwanteve
rydogandsomecat(s).Astandardinterpretationinvolvingintersectionor
unionofgeneralizedquantifiers(alaKeenan&Faltz1985,oranyotherMon
tagovianapproach)correctlypredictsthatthetwonegativequantifiersdo
notcancelout,anddonotrequireaspecialreadingforoneofthenegative
quantifiers(asinNC)either.

17

(20)

a.

b.

I'm willing to bet you your weight in pure Kona coffee

that you've got some completely self-serving reason for
coming to Bixby's rescue. Nobody does good deeds for
nothing, not in this world. I wasn't born yesterday.
their love of God is based on a sentimental relationism,
or it is out of a disguised self-interest according to market ideologies (in Parry's words, " nobody does anything for nothing ").

In other words, in the 450 million words of the COCA corpus of

American English, with nothing and nobody of which there are respectively 144 737 and 39 264 occurrences, not one case of Double Negation expressed by two n-words with shared scope over the same predicate.
The unsatisfactory results for cases equivalent to (3) led me to
return to English equivalents of (8). Search for the co-occurrence of not
and nobody in the COCA corpus at a distance of 4 words yield 588 results (a distance of 9 yielded 8 059 cases, which did not seem on a rapid assessment to add a significant number of relevant cases). Choice of
not was motivated by the intention to exclude dialectal or register varieties where contracted negative and NC would be expected to be preponderant (Rowlett 1998). Of these results, 49 examples provided not
and nobody with scope over the same clause.
The 49 attestations comprised 30 cases of NC. Of these, 14 occurrences are activated,
(21)

a.
b.

Why don't you ask Mrs. -- " Todd's hands went up in

protest. " Nope, nope. Not asking nobody
I'm not Gertrude's cook any more. I'm not nobody's.

and 16 are not.

(22)

a.

b.

"I figured, hey, they've brought us another kicker in

here," McKenzie said. Then he found out Detmer was
the backup quarterback. "I told the guys, ' We'd better
not let nobody get a hand on this guy.
But see, my brother's off on this fishing trip, him and
his wife. Left his van at our mom's house in Nanticoke

18

Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody

drive it.
The 19 cases of Double Negation comprise 16 occurrences of activation (84 %), of which 4 representative examples are given below.
(23)

a.
b.
c.
d.

- REMY Oh... him? He's nobody.

GUSTEAU Not nobody. He is part of the kitchen.
everybody who's listening or those that are not listening
-- hope nobody is not listening to your show today.
They know me, " his wife's uncle said. " You, " he said,
" are not nobody but my niece Marice's husband.
It's the matter of being worried or not. I mean, nobody
is not worried.

8 are explicitly activated. 8 involve a correction, that accommodates the

rejected proposition as discourse-old (Larrive 2012). The 3 occurrences that are not explicitly activated distribute with modal verbs as in
(24), and in 1 other contexts (25).
(24)

(25)

a.

I recall Mahalia Jackson said years ago that nobody

could not be a believer after they had heard certain
kinds of gospel;
b.
I'm going out there for a weight program. We're going
to be together and we're going to get things worked
out. This is for her and me to work things out. That's
my pride and joy right there. Nobody might not believe that, Jerry, but she is.
The fact is that either through a misread of intelligence or an
overreaching interpretation of rather poor intelligence, we took
a nation that was very sharply contained, the Iraq regime under
Saddam Hussein, who nobody loves and nobody supports or
nobody is not glad to see gone,

The results from the search are summarised in the following table.

19

Explicitly
activated

Other

Totals

DN

16

3 (2 with 19
recurrent
expressions)

NC

14

16

30

30

19

49

Table2.DistributionofreadingofcooccurrenceofnobodyandnotinCOCA

This confirms what was found for the same configuration in French.
Despite English being a DN language, and despite the configuration
being strongly biased in favour of DN, DN is a minority reading.
While explicit activation plays a role for a little under half of NC cases,
it associates to 84% of English DN, which a standard statistical test
shows to be significant. When not explicitly discourse-old, DN cases
relate to recurrent expressions in 2 cases out of 3. Both triggers account for 95% of English DN data, thus supporting the markedness of
DN as well as the French data do.
A final confirmation of DN markedness even in DN-biased
configurations and of the role of contextual cues and IS determinants
for the interpretation is sought by looking at adjacent uses of clausemate not in the Coca corpus. The 204 395 single occurrences of not
yield 102 hits, of which 89 are clause-mate. There are 34 cases that do
not have a DN interpretation: they are found in spoken and written
press and may or may not relate to performance errors (as described in
Horn 2010: 124-128), although some of these appear genuine cases of
negative spread.

20

(26)

a.
b.

On game point you do not not drive to the basket

without receiving a nasty hack.
victims should be remembered by their friends and
loved ones for who they were, not not for the horrible
way they died.

with a possible emphatic value for the examples above. Explicit activation plays a role for 13 occurrences (38% of NC), non-activated cases
co-occurring with modals in 8 further cases (24% of NC).
The 55 DN cases relate to explicit activation in a little under
half of the occurrences (49%).
(27)

a.
b.

in my book, it's not about the weight. But it's not not
about weight if you're uncomfortable in your body.
Aren't those sex toys? " # " Not exactly, I don't think.
But they're not not sex toys, either.

In 1 case, it is the positive proposition rather than the negative one that
was present in the antecedent context.
(28)

TREVOR: I know she's a beautiful woman, and so I've seen

that. And... TRINA: Yes, but I'm not not beautiful now,
though. That's the problem

The 28 cases of DN that do not involve explicit activation are massively co-occuring with modal verbs, typically can, with 26 examples (93%
of non-explicitly activated DN instances).
(29)

a.

b.

She stops. They will all think she is crazy if she doesn't
stop. You can not not expect people to understand
such things as your whole body coming to the strangest,
most vivid kind of life when the sight of something in
the present sparks a memory of the past.
On the other hand, even in the churches you can only
trust up to a certain degree. Everyone knows that there
are some people in the churches whose job it is to report things to the police. And, in fact, they can not not
do that because they don't know who else is an informer in the community.

21

A summary of results is provided by the table below:

Explicitly
activated

Other

Totals

DN

27

28 (26 with 55
recurrent
expressions)

NC

13

21

34

40

49

89

Table3.DistributionofreadingofadjacentnotnotinCOCA

The configuration with two adjacent clausal negators yields a majority

of DN readings. This strongly supports markedness of DN, as in the
context that would appear to most favour it, NC still occurs in 38% of
occurrences. As for the DN cases, half have discourse-old status
(49%), which was not found to be statistically significant. The other
half of cases that are not discourse-old relate to recurrent expressions
for 93% of them. 96% of all DN occurrences were however tied to either IS or recurrent expression, which as previously support DN markedness. The significance of the results presented in this section is discussed in the concluding discussion that follows.

4.Concludingdiscussion
This paper addresses the issue of negative dependencies between multiple clause-mate negative items. Conclusive results on Negative Concord and Double Negation interpretations are provided as to the following assumptions:

22

1. Double Negation is a marked interpretation wrt Negative

Concord;
2. The markedness of DN implies that it is triggered by particular contextual cues;
3. The defining trigger of DN relates to Information Structure.
These assumptions are assessed by looking at actual usage of French
(Google France) and English (COCA Corpus) for three types of clauses with multiple negatives: clausal negator plus n-word as in (2) and (8),
two n-words as in (1) and (3), and two clausal negators as in He did not
not work.
Co-occurrences of clausal negator plus n-word as in (2) and (8)
is believed to be strongly biased in favour of DN in English, as it is in
French. Yet, half the occurrences (186 out of 371) are DN in the
French data, and even fewer in the English material (19 out of 49).
While the presence of NC could be interpreted as a reflex of a NC
macro-parameter assumed to characterise French (Zeijlstra 2004), no
such assumption can be made to explain the situation in English that is
supposed to be a DN language. It could be argued that the weight of
NC is due to the inclusion in the corpus of social or regional varieties
where NC is allowed across the board. However, the choice of markers
ensured the exclusion of non-standard varieties, and while the internet
may contain a higher proportion of use of such varieties of French,
there is no reason to believe that it is so for COCA which actually has
a higher rate of NC than Google France does.3 These observations
support the conclusion that DN is marked. Markedness is strongly
supported by co-occurrences of two n-words as in (1) and (3). Such sequences reading are very rare with a DN in real usage, as they are in the
English data. Not one of the 110 clauses with nobody and nothing scoping over the same predicate is DN, which is found only in 6 cases

PatrickDuffleycorrectlyidentifies(21)and(22)asdisplayingnonprescriptivefeatures.
MypointisthatNCreadingsofclausematenegativesineitherEnglishorFrenchcannotbe
explained away by relegating them exclusively to regional dialectsknown only to some
speakers: the data suggests that speakers of these languages are able to produce and un
derstand clausemate negatives with a NC reading (see the evidence in Blanchette 2013).
ThisofcourseiswhatisexpectedifNCisunmarkedforpsycholinguisticreasonsasdiscus
sed below. The vehement denial of this ability by some speaker is a testimony to the
strenght of prescriptive exhortations in communities with a normative tradition (Haspel
math1997:section8.2).

23

where nothing has constituent scope. Markedness is also suggested by

co-occurrences of clausal negators as in He did not not work, which are
DN in English in half the occurrences. That NC creeps in even in
most unfavourable contexts tallies with the observation by Espinal and
Prieto that 32% of subjects still choose a NC reading in DN-biased
environments (see also Espinal, Tubau, Borrs-Comes and Prieto this
volume), and with the recent experimental results from Amaral and
Varnadoe-Russ (2013) demonstrating strong preference for NC over
DN.
Assumptions 2. and 3. are well supported by the data. The expectation is that the rejected negative clause is discourse-old, and the
rejecting negator is discourse-new. In other words, in (2) John is not doing nothing meaning It is not the case that John is doing nothing, not would be
new information rejecting old information represented by John is doing
nothing. Using only the most manifest type of discourse-old information
as what has been explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context, DN
readings of clauses such as (2) and (8) relate to the rejected sequence
being discourse-old in 66% of cases in French and 84% in English.
This is significant as NC readings associate to discourse-old configurations in 21% in French and 47% in English. 49% of English DN sequences such as John did not not work are discourse-old. Almost all of the
non-explicitly activated DN cases for each configuration relate to recurrent expressions, including French conventional expressions (notably I have not done nothing, It has not got nothing to do with it), English
corrections (of the type He is not nobody, with 50% of explicitly activated
English DN) and modals (11% of non-explicitly activated English configuration John is not doing nothing, 47% of non-explicitly activated configuration John is not not working).

24

Configuration

DN

Explicitly

Not explicitly

Percentage of

interpretation

activated DN

activated DN

DN not tied to

as % of total

as % of total

with recurrent

an

corpora

DN

expressions as

trigger as % of

% of total DN

total DN

occurrences

(2) John 39%

is
not
doing
nothing

84%

11%

5%

(8) Jean 50%

ne
fait
pas rien

66%

30%

5%

John
is 69%
not
not
working

49%

47%

4%

identified

Table3.DistributionofDNreadingsintermsofInformationStructure

Strong contextual co-occurrences are arguably a type of discourse-old

information in the sense that they are linguistic sequences accessible to
both speaker and hearer as part of the common linguistic repertoire.
The convergent role of explicit activation and recurrent expressions
and their massive representation for DN interpretations confirm the
role of a discourse-old / discourse-new partition for DN readings.
They show that DN is marked because it relates to two identifiable
triggers, which together account for 95% of attestations.
While an Information Structure analysis of Double Negation
readings is strongly supported, and on the basis of only the most restrictive explicit activation criteria, there is a need for some qualifications. The formulated expectation that the rejected negative clause

25

would be discourse-old is not always the case. The predicate is always

discourse-old, but the rejected n-word isnt always. Example (23b)
above is a case in point
(23)

b.

everybody who's listening or those that are not listening

-- hope nobody is not listening to your show today.

It is the predicate that is discourse-old, and neither negative is mentioned before, although nothing is accommodated as activated as suggested by the paraphrase I hope its not the case that nobody is listening. There
is a similar case cited in (28) among the 27 occurrences of activated
DN found in the not not configuration.
Information Structure configurations are also realised through
recurrent expressions. 42% of English DN cases for examples such as
(1) are found in correction environments of the type not nobody; 72% of
the French cases relating to (8) are found with the four most frequent
contexts; 47% of DN with two clausal negators in English relate to
modal verb environments.4 That is not to say that DN cannot occur
outside these environments, but some collocational environments definitely favour a DN reading. This further supports assumption 2 above
that DN markedness relates to specific contextual triggers. (It was
pointed out that NC has one categorical trigger, and that is coordination, illustrated by (19), for which an explanation is yet to be offered by
theoretical models, although see footnote 2.) This contradicts a macroparameter analysis in which French would be NC across the board and
English DN. The presence of NC to significant degrees in two DNbiased configurations in both languages does not support a macroparametric analysis where one language would favour NC and the other DN. The fact that configurations with two clausal negators are more
related to DN that the other two configurations further illustrate the
relation of negative dependencies to specified environments, against a
macro-parametric approach. The absence of contextual cues in a lan
4

Onewouldwantthisobservationtoreceiveanexplanation.Ispeculatethattherearetwo
probablereasonsforEnglishpreferenceforDNinmodalenvironments:theymakeparti
tionofthediscoursenewnegatorandthediscourseoldnegativepropositioneasierto
computeasthediscourseoldnegativecanberelatedtotheinfinitiveverb;suchapartition
canalsobehelpedbythetendencyofmodalstorangeoveralternativeevent,including
nonrealisation,thusfacilitatingparsingofdoublenegatives.Thedemonstrationofeither
thesespeculationssadlygoesbeyondthescopeofthischapter.

26

guage may account for the difficulties in eliciting DN, Romanian being
a case in point (Falaus 2006), calling for further examination.
If parameters are not responsible for negative dependencies,
then what is? The comparable situation in English and French suggest
that we may be dealing with a psycholinguistic bias rather than some
categorical parameter. An indication of this is the general assumption
that all Creoles allow NC (Dprez 1999), and given that Creoles are believed to provide with unmarked options (e.g. Bickerton 1981), NC
would therefore represent a universally unmarked option, forcing DN
to be signalled by contextual factors. Such a conclusion would need
support from acquisitional studies. The prediction if there is a cognitive bias in favour of NC is that the acquisition and processing of DN
would appear later or be more demanding. Fortunately, such studies do
exist, and the results they document tally with expectations. Zhou,
Thornton and Crain (2013) establishes that whereas NC was unproblematic to Mandarin-speaking children, these did not achieve adult-like
results in comprehension and production of DN until age 6, before
which they interpreted and produced DN configurations as NC. This
suggests that the non-adult performance of children before age 6 might
be due to working memory limitations, echoing the claim by Corblin
that DN is more difficult to process than NC. There are reasonable
grounds to propose that DN markedness is due to a bias in favour of
NC because the latter is easier to process. We are back to Corblins
proposals, although with rather a better empirical basis to support the
claim.
The work presented here establishes the following:
1. that DN is a marked reading with respect to NC, the latter
being found even in DN-biased environments;
2. that markedness is found in DN being associated to collocational environments that vary according to languages and to the
specific configuration involved (recurrent expressions for
French Jean ne fait pas rien, corrections and modals for He is not
doing nothing, modals for John is not not working)
3. that DN is strongly correlated to an IS partition such that
the rejected negative clause is discourse-old and the rejecting
negative is discourse-new.
It has been put forward that DN markedness is due to a psycholinguistic bias in favour of NC. That would be why DN is correlated to avail-

27

able collocational environments, in the absence of which DN would be

elusive, as it the case of Romanian. The differential behaviour of configurations (two clausal negators vs. two n-words) is calling for explanation, and it can be noted that this runs counter to predictions that
NC obtains more readily when negative expressions are of the same
type (Biberauer and Roberts 2012), since two n-words should then behave in the same way with respect to NC as two clausal negators do,
contrary to observations in this paper that n-words rarely cancel each
other out whereas more often than not two clausal negators do. Finally, while Information Structure plays a crucial role, it is not a categorical trigger of DN in usage,5 since it occurs also with NC, and since DN
is found without the expected IS partition, although in that case almost
always with recurrent expressions.
One question that could be asked if whether the expected IS
partition always generates DN. One way to test this would be through
an experimental protocol. Such a protocol could be based on a narration that is ideal to assess IS factors such as explicit activation. The
narration could introduce a discourse-old negative proposition in a narration, that is to be found with a negator later on, to check whether a
NC or DN reading is understood by subjects. An illustration of possible verbal stimuli is provided by the short text below.
(27)

Pour lanniversaire de Marie, Paul stait bien prpar. Il avait

invit plusieurs personnes. Il avait achet un beau cadeau,
command du champagne et rserv un bon traiteur. Il craignait cependant que les invits ne mangent rien parce que la fte
avait lieu en aprs-midi.
For Maries birthday, Paul was well prepared. He had invited
several people. He had bought a nice present, ordered champagne et reserved a good catering service. He feared however
that people would eat nothing because the party was taking
place in the afternoon.

Noncategoricalassociationisexpectedaccordingtoareviewerbecausewearedealing
withpragmaticmatters,whichwouldonlyberelatedtogrammaticaltendencies.Icould
notdisagreemore.IhaveestablishedinLarrive(2011)thatsomemarkednegativesare
categoricallyusedwithdiscourseoldpropositions,andthatoncethiscategoricalassocia
tionislost,thenegativeeitherbecomesadefaultordisappears.

28

a.

b.

Personne na rien mang, tout le monde tait content,

et Marie tait ravie de son cadeau.
Nobody ate nothing, everybody was happy and Marie
was delighted with her present.
Les invits nont pas rien mang, tout le monde tait
content, et Marie tait ravie de son cadeau.
The guests did not eat nothing, everybody was happy
and Marie was delighted with her present.

The understanding of the critical sentence can be checked by picture

selection, by judgment on comments provided by a third party (typically puppets in experiments with children), or more naturally on discourse continuation (adding either to the extent that more food was needed
for DN or so that the food had to be given away for NC). The prediction
would be that DN should be categorical with the expected IS partition.
This papers hopes to have provided a base-line for the study of
Double Negation interpretation in natural languages. It shows that Information Structure plays an important role in establishing Double
Negation readings, which associates to particular co-occurrences with
the various configurations (John is not doing nothing, John is not not working). The need for these triggers demonstrate that DN is marked, as
does the fact that NC is found in environments biased in favour of
DN. Contextual triggers matter to interpretation in actual usage, as it is
the basis for language learning and therefore for the cognitive development and structure of language. The markedness of DN argues for
the existence of a cognitive bias in favour of Negative Concord interpretation, presumably for reasons of ease of treatment. I hope to pursue the relations between cognitive processes and negative dependencies in future endeavours.

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