Negative indefinites in Afrikaans

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the syntactic and semantic status of negative indefinites in Afrikaans. The problem posed by negative indefinites is that their interpretation appears to differ across double negation (DN) and negative concord (NC) languages. With respect to negative indefinites, Afrikaans displays features that distinguish it from both typical NC and typical DN languages. Contrary to most NC languages, and similarly to DN languages, standard Afrikaans does not allow negative indefinites to co-occur with a NC interpretation. If multiple negative indefinites do co-occur, the utterance is given a DN interpretation in standard Afrikaans. However, in colloquial Afrikaans multiple negative indefinites can co-occur with a NC interpretation. It is this potential ambiguity between NC and DN interpretations of multiple negative indefinite combinations on the one hand, and the variation in the expression of multiple indefinites in the scope of negation on the other hand, that forms the central focus of the dissertation. The analysis of negative indefinites in Afrikaans proposed in this dissertation is formulated in the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT) and is based on both empirical data and theoretical observations. The empirical data include (i) data from a corpus study, undertaken to determine the prevalence of multiple negative indefinite combinations in written Afrikaans; (ii) data from a perception experiment, undertaken to obtain acceptability judgments, as well as meaning judgements, of auditory stimuli; and (iii) data from a sentence production experiment, undertaken to determine how reliably naﶥ speakers produce disambiguating prosodic cues for multiple negative indefinite combinations with a double negation meaning in everyday contextualised speech. With regard to the meaning of negative indefinite combinations it is found that a very specific prosodic contour is essential for the accurate interpretation of DN multiple negative indefinite combinations in Afrikaans, and that when this prosodic contour is missing, or unclear, the default interpretation for multiple negative indefinites is an NC interpretation. Special attention is given in the dissertation to the negative indefinite “g’n” as it occurs in colloquial Afrikaans, showing that there are in fact three types of “g’n”. The first “g’n” is a negative determiner, similar to its full phonological form geen. The second “g’n” functions as a sentential negative marker with a restricted ability to occur on its own in place of sentence-medial “nie”, while the third “g’n” functions in combinations with other negative indefinites, such as “niks”, as an intensifier, increasing the grade of negation, and resulting in an emphatic negative form made up of two separate negative elements. This dissertation is of interest to researchers working on negation in general and to those interested in Afrikaans, and negation in Afrikaans