Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Expletive negative markers, i.e., negative markers that do not reverse the truth conditions of the sentence in which they occur, have been reported to appear in a wide array of languages and in a fairly large set of syntactic environments. Previous research has shown that expletive negation is a non-homogeneous phenomenon. Focusing on Greek, I motivate two general claims related to this non-homogeneity: (i) Greek expletive negation hosts can be classified into two linguistically relevant groups, depending on whether they feature the standard negative marker dhen or the modal negative marker min . (ii) The semantic contribution of the expletive occurrences of dhen and min retains at least parts of the meaning of their respective non-expletive counterparts. After presenting some first evidence that the dichotomy of expletive negation hosts motivated by the Greek data extends to other languages, I submit the following hypothesis as a novel promising perspective in the study of expletive negation cross-linguistically: The bi-partite distinction between dhen -expletive negation hosts and min -expletive negation hosts may be cross-linguistically valid, suggesting that expletive negation hosts across languages are divided into two classes: (a) a class of expletive negation licensors that obscure the truly negative semantics of the featured negative markers, and (b) a class of modal expletive negation licensors that feature expletive negative markers corresponding to the spell-out of modal or deontic ordering sources.
Source: Linguistics
Author: Evripidis Tsiakmakis
Institution: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409126281