Negation

There has been a discussion over the years about how to treat negation. The English and German grammars register negation as an ADJUNCT (ADJUNCT-TYPE neg) in the f-strucutre. However, this analysis did not seem to make sense for affixal negation on the verb. Instead, the presence of negation is just registered via a NEG + feature. The ParGram grammars are currently split how they analyze negation between these two options.

At the ParGram meeting in Oxford in 2006, a decision was taken that all grammar should experiment with a possibly complex NEG feature (Negation_committee_report.pdf). The problem here is that you get examples like "I didn't not go." in English and it is not clear how to treat that with just a NEG feature.

Also there is maybe an issue with respect to NPI items that one might want to think about. But perhaps this is best left for semantics.

At the ParGram meeting after the LFG conference in Debrecen in 2013, there was a roundtable discussion on negation in LFG. The overview presentation (negation_prezi_2013_ParGram.pdf) contains extracts from the joint ACL 2013 paper on ParGramBank (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/P13-1054.pdf) and some concomitant email correspondence on individual grammars, as well as screenshots of XLE-analyses of various negation constructions. The major points are as follows:

• The ADJUNCT/NEG+ choice does not always correlate with the expected language type in the XLE grammars: Polish has a negative adjunct but the XLE grammar uses the NEG+ feature; Indonesian uniformly employs the ADJUNCT-analysis even if it has several distinct negative marker types.
• Several languages have competing negation strategies (Wolof, Indonesian, French). Thus some level of consistency is an issue crosslinguistically as well as within some of the grammars.
• Problems for the NEG+ analysis: "I cannot not go" (see also above), scope-interactions
• Problems for the ADJUNCT analysis: relation between "John didn't see anybody" and "John saw nobody"; or between "John didn't have any time" and "John had no time" ("no" is a quantifier in the English grammar with the feature POL negative)
• General issue: separate clearly f-structure issues and semantic issues in the analysis

The novel discussion at the ParGram meeting 2015 in Warsaw, which was substantiated by a talk by Tibor Laczko on Hungarian negation, lead to the insight that maybe what one should do is to adopt the differentiated treatment put forward by the Hungarian grammar. The slides by Tibor are attached (laczko_negation_ParGram_Warsaw_140204.pdf).