Negation in gapping / Sophie Repp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Repp, Sophie.

Series:

Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics ; 22.

Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics ; 22

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general--Negatives.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.

Physical Description:

xi, 266 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Summary:

This book presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the behaviour of negation in gapping sentences. Sophie Repp focusses on German and English with reference to Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Slovak. She shows that these languages exhibit important differences in the interaction of gapping and negation and further that no account in the literature explains why this should be. Dr Repp also argues that the precise interpretation of an elided negation depends on varying combinations of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic factors. Illustrating her argument by the interpretation of the negation in examples such as 'Pete hasn't got a video and John a DVD', 'Pete didn't clean the whole flat and John laze around all afternoon', and 'To Mary, Pete didn't say anything and to Sue, only that he was hungry', Dr Repp questions a basic assumption in the analysis of gapping: that the meaning of the two conjuncts must be parallel in the elided material. This leads her to a wide-ranging discussion of the interpretation of scope and the nature of negation. She then proposes a syntactic analysis that both takes into account the interaction of the grammatical interfaces and is at the same time compatible with more general assumptions of current generative theory. She concludes by considering the implications of her findings for linguistic theory more generally.

Contents:

Introduction

The problem and outline of the book

Some basic features of gapping

Theories of gapping

Summary and sketch of the proposal

The syntax of clausal negation : the distributed scope readings in main verb gapping

Clausal negation in English and German

Adjuncts in gapping

The syntax of gapping : proposal

The right kind of contrast : narrow scope readings

Contrastive but

And and the principle of balanced contrast

Auxiliary gapping and contrasting vPs

Focus particles

Summary

Negation and the speech act

Corrections and corrective but : more narrow scope readings

The wide scope readings

Finiteness in gapping

Assertion

Anchoring

Anchoring and gapping

Summary.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [235]-261) and index.

ISBN:

9780199543618

0199543615

9780199543601

0199543607

OCLC:

228607992