The Markedness of Double Negation

Abstract

Is Double Negation (DN) a marked interpretation with respect to Negative Concord (NC) as universally assumed? This is what is verified in this article that reports on actual usage in French and English. It investigates three configurations with multiple clause-mate negative expressions (clausal negator with a n-word, two n-words, and two clausal negators). The data is analysed for the relative proportion of NC and DN readings, and for identifiable triggers of DN. The predictions if DN is marked are that NC as a default should occur even in contexts biased for DN, and that specific collocations and contextual factors trigger DN readings. Current work leads to the expectation that the determinant factor for DN is an Information Structure (IS) configuration, in which the rejected negative clause is old information explicitly mentioned in the antecedent context and the rejecting negator is discourse-new. Both predictions are supported by the data: contexts biased in favour of DN still display NC interpretations in up to half of the corpus occurrences; and DN is strongly correlated to the expected IS structure (up to 84 %), and in other cases to recurrent collocations (up to 46 %). The findings demonstrate that DN is marked as the result not of a macro-parameter, but of a psycholinguistic bias that favours NC as a default interpretation for negative dependencies due to greater ease of processing, in line with recent psycholinguistic results.