The central concern of this volume is to show how the different types of Negative Concord manifest themselves in Creole languages. Creoles offer an unprecedented field of study not only for Creolists but also for theoretical, historical, socio-, and psycholinguistic research. The kind of simplification of syntactic forms that characterizes Creoles reflects the creative power of the human brain, bringing about structures that can be acquired by Creole children more easily than can be the structures of the lexifier language (see Holm Reference Holm2002).
Negative Concord (NC) is a straightforward example of this creative power. The term itself refers to contructions wherein multiple negative items co-occur without rendering the clause positive. The rich selection of papers in this volume provides a faithful picture of Strict Negative Concord, Asymmetric Negative Concord, Expletive Negative Concord, Anti-Negative Concord, and negative polarity items (NPIs) in French-based, English-based, Portuguese-based, and other Creoles.
The volume is divided into four parts, according to the lexifier language of the Creoles under discussion: Part I discusses French-related Creoles, like Guadeloupean, Haitian, and Mauritian. Part II deals with English-related Creoles such as Pichi, Vincentian, and Singapore English. Three Portuguese-related Creoles: Cape Verdean, Korlai Indo-Portuguese, and Guinea-Bissaou Kriyol, are discussed in Part III. Finally, Creoles based on other lexifiers, such as Palenquero, Sri Lankan Malay and Sri Lankan Portuguese, are dealt with in Part IV.
Central to the syntactic phenomenon of Negative Concord are the issues of whether the multiple occurrences of negative items are intrinsically negative, and whether they have any quantificational force of their own (i.e., whether a negative item can license another negative item). In the so-called Strict Negative Concord languages (Giannakidou Reference Giannakidou2000, Reference Giannakidou, Maienborn, von Heusinger and Portner2011), the abstract sentence negator (NEG) must be overtly expressed, no matter how many additional negative items appear in the sentence. NEG is the sole semantic licenser of all negative items. This means that a negative item cannot license another negative item in the absence of the sentence negator. Recent accounts of Strict Negative Concord languages take it that morphologically negative items in such languages are semantically neither negative nor quantificational (Déprez Reference Déprez1997, Reference Déprez2000; Giannakidou Reference Giannakidou2000, Reference Giannakidou, Maienborn, von Heusinger and Portner2011; Puskas Reference Puskás, Kenesei, Kiss and Siptár2002, Reference Puskás2012). Negative items obtain their quantificational force from the abstract NEG operator, which licenses them semantically simply by having them in its scope (Ladusaw Reference Ladusaw and Wansing1996). Most Creoles selected in the volume employ the Strict Negative Concord Strategy, irrespective of their lexifier language. The differences lie in their additional strategies, the locality restrictions they exert, and the range of negative items they use in multiple negation constructions.
As Viviane Déprez shows in Part I, most French-related Creoles exhibit the Strict Negative Concord strategy. In Haitian Creole, preverbal and post-verbal negative items are licit only if the sentence negator pa ‘NEG’ appears in the sentence. In addition, the so-called sans ‘without’-construction exhibits what the author calls ‘expletive negative concord’. Sans ‘without’ is intrinsically negative, therefore the sentence negator pa ‘NEG’ is vacuously applied in this construction.
Fabiola Henri argues that Mauritian Creole is also a Strict Negative Concord language. Preverbal negative items cannot license post-verbal ones without the overt sentence negator pa ‘NEG’ as in Pesonn pa konn nanye. ‘Nobody knows anything.’ The author analyses such sentences as involving resumptive quantification, also found in Standard English sentences of the type Two detectives caught two criminals (May Reference May1991). She takes the sentence negator pa ‘NEG’ to be vacuous in ‘multiple negation’ sentences.
Simon Petitjean and Emmanuel Schang convincingly show that Guadeloupean also follows the Strict Negative Concord pattern; however, unlike Haitian Creole, it does not allow long-distance licensing of negative items. These items must always be locally licensed by the sentence negator pa ‘NEG’.
In the first chapter of Part II, Kofi Yakpo discusses Negative Concord in the English-related Creole of Equatorial Guinea, called Pichi. As is typical in English-based Creoles, Pichi forms sentence negation by the preverbal negative particle no ‘NEG’ in the present tense. In perfect tenses, the complex forms nea/noba and don are used to express sentence negation. Pichi displays Strict Negative Concord. In particular, preverbal and post-verbal negative items are exclusively licensed by the sentence negator no ‘NEG’, as in A no si no man na bus. ‘I didn't see anybody in the forest.’
Paula Prescod discusses Vincentian in detail (as an example of well-known English-based Atlantic Creoles like Jamaican, Belizean, Sranan, Trinidadian, etc.). While in West African Creoles the Negative Concord strategy co-exists with the NPI strategy of the lexifier language, Caribbean Creoles, and among them, Vincentian, exclusively employ the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy, also found in Romance languages. In contrast to Romance languages, however, in which the sentence negator NEG is excluded with preverbal negative items and is obligatory with post-verbal negative items, Vincentian optionally also allows the sentence negator with preverbal negative items. Therefore, Prescod defines Vincentian as a Non-Strict Negative Concord language, to distinguish it from Spanish, where such optionality is never found.
Luwen Cao and Zhiming Bao investigate negation in Singapore English. Among English-based Creoles, Singapore English is the rare exception that, by and large, follows the NPI strategy of Standard English. However, in Singapore English, sentence negation can be formed without the auxiliary do/did, as in He no write the name. ‘He did not write his name.’ Here the preverbal negative particle no expresses sentence negation. In addition, never often functions as sentence negator in the past tense: I never heard a sound. ‘I did not hear a sound.’ Interestingly, the auxiliary do may co-occur with modal verbs: Can don't write in pen? NPIs are used in Singapore English in the same way as in Standard English: Today we are not going to do any writing. A peculiar feature of Singapore English, which is not available in Standard English, is that the universal quantifier may have the wide scope interpretation over sentence negation: Everybody don't know who set up the OHP. ‘Nobody knows who has set up the OHP.’ The negated auxiliary don't is used to express sentence negation, which has narrow scope in the presence of the universal quantifier.
In Part III, Portuguese-related Creoles like Cape Verdean Creole (CVC), Korlai Indo-Portuguese and Guinea-Bissau Kriyol are investigated. As Marlyse Baptista and Emanuel Correira de Pína point out, both preverbal and post-verbal negative items in Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) require licensing by the sentence negator ka ‘NEG’: Ningen ka ben. OR Ka ben ningen. ‘No one came’. This places CVC among the Strict NC languages.
Fernanda Pratas deals with negative items like ningen ‘no one’ and nada ‘nothing’ in CVC. The author investigates pre-INFL and post-INFL negative items and concludes that CVC Negative Concord differs from Romance Asymmetric Negative Concord in that CVC negative items must be licensed by the sentence negator ka ‘NEG’ both in pre-INFL and in post-INFL position. This accords with Baptista and Correira de Pina's analysis of CVC as a Strict Negative Concord language.
In the next chapter, J. Clancy Clements looks at Korlai Indo-Portuguese. In order to decide whether this language uses the Strict NC or the Asymmetric NC strategy, the author looks at sentences in which sentence negation co-occurs with other negative items, as in Nu jave ninge. ‘NEG came no one’ OR Ninge nu jave. ‘No one NEG came.’ Such sentences point to an analysis of Korlai Indo-Portuguese as a Strict Negative Concord language. This proposal gains further support from sey ‘without’-clauses, which are inherently negative, and yet may contain negative items.
The last chapter in Part III by Alain Kihm is a comparative study of Guinea-Bissau Kriyol and its lexifier language. As the author notes, Kriyol employs Strict NC, despite the fact that its lexifier, Portuguese, shows Asymmetric NC. Strict NC is, therefore, unexpected, especially because the substrate/adstrate languages (Mandinka, Manjaku, Wolof), employ the Anti-Negative Concord strategy, where negative items can also be used as NPIs. The author attributes the switch to Strict NC in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol to the change in the lexical category of the sentence negator. In Portuguese, the sentence negator nao ‘NEG’ is an adverb, whereas Kriyol ka ‘NEG’ is a functional category within the verbal projection.
In Part IV, Armin Schwegler discusses negation in Palenquero. He mentions three possible ways of formulating sentential negation in this language, depending on the position of the negative particle nu ‘NEG’: preverbal, embracing, and post-verbal. In his account, preverbal order is used in pragmatically neutral sentences, whereas the embracing and post-verbal uses of the negative particle are found in response to a question or as a reinforcement of denial. This author's neutral vs. emphatic distinction has been countered in Dieck (Reference Dieck2000), who puts forward a morpho-syntactic explanation of the placement of the negative particle. Schwegler concludes that this issue has not been decided satisfactorily and requires further investigation.
Peter Slomanson compares two Dravidian-influenced contact languages, Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) and Sri Lankan Portuguese (SLP) in the next chapter. In both contact languages, finiteness morphology is essential for expressing sentential negation. Namely, in SLM and in SLP, the negative marker does not combine with any verbal morphological marker, except for finiteness.
The two major languages of Sri Lanka, Tamil and Sinhala, do not show much similarity with either of these contact languages with regards to their verbal morphology.
The Conclusion by Déprez and Henri is a summary of the findings in the volume, the most important of which is that the landscape of Negative Concord in Creole languages is far more colourful than previously assumed. Without this book, it would be impossible to appreciate this rich inventory. This unique collection of papers on how Negative Concord is used in French-based, English-based, Portuguese-based and other Creoles is a useful source of information, in addition to Creole studies, and also for theoretical, historical, comparative, socio-, and psycholinguistic research.
