Johan Van der Auwera

Johan Van der Auwera is Professor Emeritus of General and English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp. He has held visiting professorships in Bangkok, Gothenburg, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Princeton, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. He is currently President of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

The project

Title: Negative concordance and connective negation. Contrastive and typological studies, with a focus on Tamazight

"Negative concordance and connective negation are two phenomena in the field of negation. The term "negative concord" is commonly used for constructions in which a single negation is expressed both at sentence level and on an indefinite constituent. This is illustrated by the Russian Ja zdes' ne znaju nikogo 'I don't know anyone here', a sentence in which ne and nikogo are intrinsically negative. The term "connective negation" can be used for what French expresses with, e.g., ni ... ni in Je n'aime ni le théâtre ni l'opéra. Negative concord is an important topic in both generative and non-generative linguistics. As for connective negation, there are a few language-specific studies, but there is little cross-linguistic work and almost nothing on the interaction of negative concord and connective negation. The aim of this project is to deepen our general knowledge of negative concord, connective negation and their interaction on the basis of a detailed study of Tamazight, in contrast with other world languages. There are few studies of negative concord in Amazigh languages, and no work on connective negation, nor on the interaction between negative concord and connective negation. The scarcity of work on negative concord and the absence of work on the interaction between negative concord and connective negation already justify the current study. But there are two additional reasons why Amazigh languages are interesting. First, Amazigh languages exhibit a variety of verb negation strategies, which poses an additional problem: which verbal negation strategy is involved in negative concord and connective negation, and why? Secondly, Amazigh languages are influenced by contact with varieties of Arabic, as well as French and Spanish. It remains to be seen whether the influence of contact is relevant to the issues under consideration, and what would be the direction of influenceNegative concordance and connective negation are two phenomena in the field of negation. The term "negative concordance" is commonly used for constructions in which a single negation is expressed both at sentence level and on an indefinite constituent. This is illustrated by the Russian Ja zdes' ne znaju nikogo 'I don't know anyone here', a sentence in which ne and nikogo are intrinsically negative. The term "connective negation" can be used for what French expresses with, e.g., ni ... ni in Je n'aime ni le théâtre ni l'opéra. Negative concord is an important topic in both generative and non-generative linguistics. As for connective negation, there are a few language-specific studies, but there is little cross-linguistic work and almost nothing on the interaction of negative concord and connective negation. The aim of this project is to deepen our general knowledge of negative concord, connective negation and their interaction on the basis of a detailed study of Tamazight, in contrast with other world languages. There are few studies of negative concord in Amazigh languages, and no work on connective negation, nor on the interaction between negative concord and connective negation. The scarcity of work on negative concord and the absence of work on the interaction between negative concord and connective negation already justify the current study. But there are two additional reasons why Amazigh languages are interesting. First, Amazigh languages exhibit a variety of verb negation strategies, which poses an additional problem: which verbal negation strategy is involved in negative concord and connective negation, and why? Secondly, Amazigh languages undergo and exert a contact influence with varieties of Arabic, as well as with French and Spanish. It remains to be seen whether contact influence is relevant to the issues under study, and what would be the direction of influence."

Hosting institution: École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• JvdA, Q.N. Hai, V. Pothipath & S. Siebenhütter. 2023. “Existential indefinite constructions, in the world and in Mainland Southeast Asia”, Journal of Linguistics 59.881-914.
• JvdA. 2023. "Mixtec negative existential cycles, standard negation and negative indefiniteness", ​Lingua 292.103528.  
• Krasnoukhova, O., JvdA & S. Norder. 2022. "Standard negation: the curious case of  South America", Linguistic Typology 2.629-666.
• JvdA & O. Krasnoukhova. 2022. "Revisiting postverbal standard negation in the Jê languages", Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 172​