Negation In Gapping (Oxford Studies In Theoretical Linguistics)

Features of Negation in Gapping (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)

This book presents a crosslinguistic investigation of the behaviour of negation in gapping sentences Sophie Repp focusses on German and English with reference to Dutch Japanese Polish Russian and Slovak She shows that these languages exhibit important differences in the interaction of gapping and negation and further that no account in the literature explains why this should be Dr Repp also argues that the precise interpretation of an elided negation depends on varying combinations of syntactic semantic pragmatic and prosodic factors Illustrating her argument by the interpretation of the negation in examples such as Pete hasnt got a video and John a DVD Pete didnt clean the whole flat and John laze around all afternoon and To Mary Pete didnt say anything and to Sue only that he was hungry Dr Repp questions a basic assumption in the analysis of gapping that the meaning of the two conjuncts must be parallel in the elided material This leads her to a wideranging discussion of the interpretation of scope and the nature of negation She then proposes a syntactic analysis that both takes into account the interaction of the grammatical interfaces and is at the same time compatible with more general assumptions of current generative theory She concludes by considering the implications of her findings for linguistic theory more generally