Expletive Negation and Polarity Alternatives

Abstract

This study investigates the nature of licensing predicates of expletive negation (ExN) and the role of ExN in Korean/Japanese and French. Recently, ExN-licensing predicates have been analyzed as a subcase of nonveridicality (Knüppel 2001 cited from Godard 2004; Choi and Lee 2009; Yoon 2009, 2013), which introduces polarity alternatives (p and $$ eg $$ p) of an embedded complement (Hamblin 1973; Martin 1987; Giannakidou 1997 among others). However, not all nonveridical predicates license ExN. We account for this overgeneration problem of nonveridicality by restricting ExN-licensing predicates to the predicates whose meaning are neg-raisers or can be lexically decomposed into opinion neg-raisers, which are involved in the belief case. On the other hand, in Korean and Japanese, epistemic predicates which are not nonveridical in the sense of Giannakidou (1997) license ExN. We solve the problem by assuming veridicality-suspension by virtue of the question complementizer. This paper analyzes the complement containing ExN in parallel with the positively biased negative question, and argues that regardless of its semantic expletive reading, it implicates that the attitude holder holds a bigger belief of the embedded proposition p than $$ eg $$ p. The analysis solves the ‘double negation effect’ with the predicates douter ‘doubt’ and nier ‘deny’ in French and the frozen expression of ExN with epistemic predicates in Korean and Japanese.