10.6092/issn.2785-0943/13508
Linguistic typology has recently started paying more and more attention to language use as an explanatory factor.&nbsp;In this approach, naturally occurring discourse data is used to account for the attested cross-linguistic patterns. This article offers a theoretical and methodological discussion of the usage-based approach taking the typology of negation as a case study. Negation is a particularly suitable domain for this kind of discussion, since (a) it is universally present in the world’s languages and relatively frequent in discourse, (b) it is well-studied from a typological point of view, and (c) due to&nbsp;its unique pragmatic status,&nbsp;it shows&nbsp;a variety of discourse effects&nbsp;that can be possibly linked to cross-linguistic generalizations. We pay specific attention to negation in non-main clauses, a previously understudied combination that can be expected to provide valuable insights due to some important similarities between the two domains.
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Olli O. Silvennoinen
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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
Explanation
Typology and usage. The case of negation
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Olli O. Silvennoinen
2022/04/14
10.6092/issn.2785-0943/13508
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University of Helsinki
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Explanation
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Zipf, George K. 1963 [1949]. <em>Human behavior and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology</em>. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Typology and usage. The case of negation
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            Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-1 (2022): 121-154   ISSN 2785-0943



                Typology and usage: The case of negation

             MATTI MIESTAMO, KSENIA SHAGAL, OLLI O. SILVENNOINEN
                                       UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI



                      Submitted: 02/09/2021        Revised version: 15/12/2021
                          Accepted: 16/12/2021 Published: 14/04/2022




                                               Abstract
Linguistic typology has recently started paying more and more attention to language use as an
explanatory factor. In this approach, naturally occurring discourse data is used to account for the
attested cross-linguistic patterns. This article offers a theoretical and methodological discussion
of the usage-based approach taking the typology of negation as a case study. Negation is a
particularly suitable domain for this kind of discussion, since (a) it is universally present in the
world’s languages and relatively frequent in discourse, (b) it is well-studied from a typological
point of view, and (c) due to its special pragmatic properties, it shows a variety of discourse
effects that can be possibly linked to cross-linguistic generalizations. We pay specific attention
to negation in non-main clauses, a previously understudied combination of domains that can be
expected to provide valuable insights due to some important similarities between the two
domains.


Keywords: typology; usage-based linguistics; explanation; negation; clause combining.




1. Introduction


The roots of language typology go further back in time (see Graffi 2010, Ramat 2010 for
overviews), but the systematic approach to cross-linguistic comparison that we today
know as language typology started in the 1960s through the work of Joseph Greenberg
(1963, 1966). Mainstream typology in the latter half of the 20th century involved
empirical cross-linguistic work based on more or less extensive and more or less balanced
world-wide language samples, using reference grammars as the main source of data. The


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Miestamo, Shagal, Silvennoinen                                              Typology and usage


cross-linguistic generalizations (types, correlations) drawn on the basis of the language
sample were then to be explained in functional terms. Such explanations are based on
the idea that language-external factors (meaning, use, processing) shape the structure of
language and can thus be evoked as functional motivations for cross-linguistic structural
patterns. For example, cross-linguistic markedness patterns are explained by iconicity
and economy (see e.g. Croft 2003). The tendency for languages to overtly mark the plural
but not the singular is seen as motivated by iconicity in that a larger number of entities
in the language-external reality is iconically reflected in more phonetic substance on the
level of linguistic form. An economy explanation for the markedness of the plural refers
to the textual frequency of the singular and plural and explains the overt marking of the
plural by the idea that it is more economical to leave the more frequent category
(singular) unmarked and use overt marking only for the less frequent category (plural).
   The kind of approach to typology just described is by no means outdated – the range
of variation that languages show is still poorly known in many domains of grammar and
the traditional approach still has a lot to contribute to the cross-linguistic study of these
domains. However, typology has become more versatile and approaches and new ways
of doing typology have emerged. In addition to core grammatical topics, more and more
is now being done, e.g. in lexical, phonological and pragmatic typology. On the
methodological side, quantitative approaches to cross-linguistic variation have gained
ground (distributional typology) and areal and historical factors have become important
as explanations for cross-linguistic distributions (see Bickel 2007). Corpus-based methods
have been developed and typological work based on (massively) parallel corpora with
its own specific methods has become a visible branch of typology (see Cysouw & Wälchli
2007).
   Corpus methods are becoming more and more relevant for typology in another way,
too. In addition to using corpora as sources of data in cross-linguistic work, their
significance is growing on the side of explanation. As noted above, functional
explanations pay attention to extra-linguistic factors such as meaning, use and
processing. Recently, more and more attention has been paid to language use as an
explanatory factor. In fact, evoking textual frequency as a motivation for the markedness
of the plural is a usage-based explanation, and already Greenberg (1966) discussed the
importance of frequency in shaping languages. Thus, this is by no means a new idea in
typology, but in practice explanations of typological patterns evoking textual frequency


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or other discourse phenomena have often been based on unsystematic observations or
rather superficial examination of natural discourse. Authors such as Givón (1979, 2001),
Du Bois (1985), Hawkins (2004) have discussed the ways in which cross-linguistic and
intra-linguistic variation in discourse are related, but the use of more sophisticated
corpus methods to explain patterns found in large-scale typological work is not very
common yet.
     In this programmatic paper, we develop the idea further and propose ways in which
usage data can be used in explaining typological variation. In other words, our focus at
this point is more on discussing the approach than presenting actual results. In our
theoretical and methodological discussion, we will take the typology of negation as the
case to be examined. As we will argue further below, negation lends itself particularly
well to examining the relationship of structure and use. The work is related to our
ongoing project Negation in Clause Combining: Typological and usage-based
perspectives (NiCC),1 funded by the Academy of Finland, in which one important aspect
is the integration of typological and usage-based work. Section 2 will discuss the
relationship between typology and usage in more depth and detail. Section 3 will address
a number of typological generalizations in the domain of negation and ways in which
these can be related to and possibly explained by discourse factors. Section 4 will address
negation in clause combining in a typological and usage-based perspective. Section 5 will
conclude the paper.


2. Typology and usage


While reference grammars continue to be the main data source for linguistic typology,
recent years have seen typologists increasingly turning to usage data, i.e. naturally
occurring texts, be they spoken, signed or written. Usage data takes centre stage in many
subdisciplines of linguistics, from corpus linguistics to interactional linguistics and
discourse analysis. In this paper, we will not draw firm distinctions between these
traditions, although our main focus will be on corpus linguistics. The use of naturally
occurring discourse in cross-linguistic comparison is part of the more general trend
towards usage-based linguistics. Usage-based linguistics has been understood in two

1
    https://blogs.helsinki.fi/negation-in-clause-combining


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Miestamo, Shagal, Silvennoinen                                            Typology and usage


partly overlapping ways: as method and as theory. These two understandings can also
be seen in the way in which typologists have utilized usage data.
   When seen as a method, usage-based linguistics refers to the use of naturally occurring
discourse data (Laury & Ono 2019). When applied to comparative linguistics, this
approach is sometimes known as token-based typology (term from Levshina 2016): in it,
corpora are used as a source of data for cross-linguistic comparison in addition to or
instead of other data types such as reference grammars and questionnaires. The corpora
in token-based typology can be either parallel corpora, i.e. corpora based on translations
of the same text(s) into different languages, or comparable corpora, i.e. corpora in
different languages with similar sampling procedures. Typologists have used parallel
corpora to see cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the expression of the same
meaning in context. These results have typically been used to create probabilistic
semantic maps (e.g. Wälchli & Cysouw 2012). Comparable corpora have been used in
particular for studying discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking (Stivers et al.
2009).
   When seen as a theory, usage-based linguistics refers to approaches that emphasize
the causal role of usage patterns in shaping grammars (e.g. Bybee 2006, 2010; Diessel
2019). Usage is then an explanatory factor for typological findings, whether they are
based on reference grammars, questionnaires or even corpus data itself, as described in
the previous paragraph. In this paper, we will mainly be concerned with usage-based
linguistics in this theoretical sense, although we will not be committed to any specific
usage-based framework. In usage-based approaches, language is seen as a complex
adaptive system (Beckner et al. 2009) whose structure is continuously shaped by
communicative pressures. The effect of such pressures is most clearly seen in diachrony,
and therefore grammaticalization and related phenomena have an important place in
usage-based approaches. If a function is common, it is likely to develop constructions of
its own – in Du Bois’s (1985: 363) words, ‘[g]rammars code best what speakers do most’.
In this perspective, grammar consists at least partly of sedimented discourse patterns.
Givón (1979: 209) characterizes this process as in (1).


(1)   Discourse → Syntax → Morphology → Morphophonemics → Zero




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According to Givón, discourse patterns may be simply paratactic in form. (1) describes a
process whereby such a paratactic pattern is first syntacticized as a result of frequent use.
Over time, the resulting construction may further morphologize and lexicalize, thus
losing its independent status. Ultimately, it may even erode completely.
   Such frequency effects have an important place in usage-based explanations. Because
prevalent patterns are more predictable, frequent expressions can afford to receive more
minimal coding (e.g. Haspelmath 2021). Crucially, communicative pressures are
assumed to be similar across speech communities (apart from some that may be specific
to certain language ecologies), and this in turn is assumed to explain typological
similarities. In sum, not only is usage worth studying in its own right, but it can also be
used to test hypotheses that are based on typological studies.
   This idea has a long history in typology: already Greenberg (1966), citing Zipf (1935,
1949), used corpus data on several topics ranging from phonology to morphosyntax and
lexical semantics to support the thesis that usage frequency can explain patterns of formal
marking. Today, many studies that hypothesize a link between a typological pattern and
usage draw on Hawkins’s (2004) Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis
(PGCH). Hawkins’s definition of the hypothesis is in (2).


(2)   Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH)
      Grammars have conventionalized syntactic structures in proportion to their degree of
      preference in performance, as evidenced by patterns of selection in corpora and by ease of
      processing in psycholinguistic experiments. (Hawkins 2004: 3)


The PGCH is linked to three efficiency principles, which Hawkins terms Minimize
Domains (MiD), Minimize Forms (MiF) and Maximize Online Processing (MaOP). To
simplify somewhat, the following predictions relevant to our subsequent discussion can
be drawn from these principles. MiD predicts that grammars prefer structures where the
processing domain between two interrelated items is as short as possible. For example,
long-distance dependencies (e.g. the students that you believe that Harry saw) are
dispreferred. MiF predicts that, the more predictable an element is in a given context,
the more its formal expression can be reduced. For example, articles are very typical
fillers of the determiner slot in English NPs compared to demonstratives, and
accordingly, they are shorter phonologically (the vs. that). MaOP predicts that grammars


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Miestamo, Shagal, Silvennoinen                                                          Typology and usage


avoid structures that would lead to incomplete or inaccurate analysis by the addressee
during comprehension. For example, finite complement clauses in English favour
retaining the complementizer that in grammatical environments that are potentially
ambiguous as it facilitates the recognition of the complement clause (e.g. I believe (that)
the boy knows the answer). It should be noted that the PGCH offers a general perspective
on the relationship between grammar and use, while the three efficiency principles,
which focus on the processing of syntactic structures, only account for a subset of the
wide variety of possible factors influencing discourse preferences.
   An implicit part of the definition in (2) is that competing alternatives, e.g. singular vs.
plural or nominative vs. accusative, are compared. It is in such sets of alternatives that
PGCH predicts the most common option to receive the least amount of coding.
Haspelmath (2021) presents evidence from a wide range of domains in support of this
(see also Haspelmath 2006, 2008). A selection of results is given in Table 1: in each case,
the construction on the left is more common in usage data than the construction on the
right, and in each case, the construction on the right receives more overt coding.


 More frequent                   Less frequent                   Examples
 singular                        plural                          (book – book-s)
 nominative (A/S)                accusative (P)                  (he – hi-m)
 allative                        ablative                        (to – from)
 positive                        comparative                     (small – small-er)
 present                         future                          (go – will go)
 affirmative                     negative                        (will go – will not go)
 inanimate patient               animate patient                 (Spanish ∅ la casa – a la mujer)
 3 person
  rd
                                 2 person
                                  nd
                                                                 (Spanish canta3SG / canta-s2SG)
 2nd person imperative           3rd person imperative           (praise! – let her praise!)
 attributive adjective           attributive verb                (small – play-ing)
 A = transitive subject, S = intransitive subject, P = direct object, ∅ = no marker


   Table 1: Examples of universal grammatical coding asymmetries (Haspelmath 2021: 606, adapted)


Results such as those in Table 1 can be cast in terms of coding asymmetry: PGCH predicts
that when there are two or more alternatives in a grammatical domain, their coding will




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be asymmetric such that the less frequent alternative will receive more overt coding.
Negation is a classic example of such an asymmetry, as Section 3 will show.


3. Cross-linguistic variation in the expression of standard negation and its
explanation by usage


There is a vast literature on negation in linguistics (see e.g. Horn [1989] 2001, 2010;
Déprez & Espinal 2020). Narrowing down to typology, there is a good amount of
relatively recent work, but attention has been paid to different subdomains of negation
to very different degrees. Most attention has been directed at standard negation, i.e.
negation in declarative main clauses with a verbal predicate. Other subdomains of
negation with at least some large-scale typological work include negative imperatives
(or prohibitives, see van der Auwera & Lejeune 2013), negation of stative predications
(existence, identity, location, possession, etc., see Veselinova 2013), and the negation of
indefinite pronouns (see Haspelmath 1997, 2013; Van Alsenoy 2014). Many aspects of
negation have, however, not yet been systematically studied by typologists (see
Miestamo 2017 for an overview on typological work on negation). In this section we will
focus on standard negation and pay special attention to cross-linguistic generalizations
for which discourse-based explanations have been proposed in the literature. Negative
constructions can be typologized from at least four perspectives: (i) type of the negative
marker, (ii), the position of the negative marker, (iii) number of negative markers in a
negative construction and (iv) the symmetry or asymmetry of negation vis-à-vis
affirmation. These perspectives will be discussed in Sections 3.2–3.4, along with
proposed explanations. We will, however, start with the overt coding of negation in
Section 3.1. In Section 4, we will turn to negation in subordinate clauses, a subdomain
of negation that has received limited attention in typology until now.


3.1. The overt coding of negation


A basic fact about negation is that it is explicitly marked compared to affirmation, as in
Table 1, where the negation of will go is will not go. Cross-linguistically, negation follows


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the usual pattern where the more common alternative (here, affirmation) is not marked
or receives less coding than the less common alternative (here, negation). Following Croft
(2003), typological markedness can be defined by the overt coding2 and behavioural
criteria. According to the overt coding criterion, the marked category is expressed by at
least as many morphemes as the unmarked one. The marked category is overtly marked
more often than the unmarked one and whenever the unmarked category is overtly
coded, then the marked one is as well. As for the behavioural criteria, the behavioural
potential of the marked category is lower than that of the unmarked one; in this section,
we will focus on overt coding and we will come back to behavioural potential in Section
3.5 below. Negation satisfies the overt coding criterion, as it is overtly coded almost
universally whereas affirmation never is. Miestamo (2010) discusses the possibility of
expressing negation without overt negators and concludes that this is an extremely rare
strategy for marking standard negation. Even though this strategy does exist in a couple
of languages, it does not provide a single counterexample to the markedness of negation,
as the affirmative is not marked in these cases, either.3
     As discussed in Sections 1 and 2 above, the overt coding of the marked members of
category pairs such as singular vs. plural and affirmation vs. negation has been explained
through economy by referring to the higher frequency of the unmarked member (see also
Haspelmath 2006). The higher frequency of the unmarked category makes it less
economical to overtly code the unmarked category. In order for such a usage-based
explanation for a typological generalization to be valid, we need usage data that supports
it. In the case of the lower textual frequency of negation, usage data is indeed available,
see e.g. Hakulinen & al. (1980: 120–121) for Finnish (91% affirmative vs. 9% negative
sentences in their corpus data, n=9772) and Givón (2001: 373) for English (90%
affirmative vs. 10% negative sentences, n=263).




2
    Croft talks about the structural criterion, but we will follow Miestamo (2007: 294) in calling it the overt
coding criterion instead.
3
    In fact, as noted by Miestamo (2007: 305), affirmation is never marked – markers that are labelled
affirmative markers in some grammars turn out to be declarative or emphatic markers rather than pure
affirmative markers.


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3.2. Type and position of negative marker


Paying attention to the type and position of the negative marker, typological work on
standard negation has identified three main types of negative markers: particle, affix and
verb (Dahl 1979; Payne 1985; Dryer 2013a, 2013b). The three main types of negative
markers are illustrated in (3)–(5) respectively.


(3)   Swedish (Indo-European; constructed example)
      Hon       arbetar      inte.
      3SG.F     work.PRS NEG
      ‘She doesn’t work.’


(4)   Turkish (Turkic; van Schaaik 1994: 38)
      Çalış-ma-yacak.
      work-NEG-FUT
      ‘She will not work.’


(5)   Finnish (Uralic; constructed example)
      Hän ei          tee       työtä.
      3SG NEG.3SG do.CNG work.PAR
      ‘She doesn’t work.’


Standard negative constructions can also be classified according to the position of the
negative marker relative to the main verb of the clause: negative particles and auxiliaries
can appear before or after the verb and negative affixes may be prefixes or suffixes. All
these types exist, but there are clear cross-linguistic tendencies. Already Jespersen
([1917] 1962) suggested that the negator tends to precede the verb and, furthermore, it
tends to appear close to the verb. Both of these tendencies were confirmed by Dahl (1979:
91–92) and later by Dryer ([2011] 2013b); the tendency for negation to precede the verb
is often referred to as the Neg-First principle (Horn [1989] 2001).
   To turn to possible usage-based explanations of these cross-linguistic tendencies, the
Neg-First principle can be understood by the importance of the negator for the correct



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interpretation of the verb: from a processing perspective, it is better to have it before
rather than after the verb. Negators will thus preferably occur before the verb in
discourse and in many languages this tendency has been conventionalized as a
grammatical pattern. In terms of Hawkins’s (2004) processing principles, this would be
an explanation based on maximising online processing (MaOP).
     As for the tendency of the negator to appear close to the verb, Thompson (1998)
attempts to account for it by relating it to the fact that negation typically does not target
anything that has been explicitly mentioned in the discourse context (Tottie 1991).
Consequently, according to Thompson, negatives do not have a strong tendency to
participate in specific adjacency pairs. This contrasts with interrogatives, whose primary
characteristic is appearing in a question–answer pair. Interrogatives are marked typically
either in initial or final position in an intonation unit, or they are marked prosodically
over the entire course of it. Thus, whereas interrogatives are motivated in relation to the
interactional structure, negation is motivated in terms of reporting events or states, i.e.
in terms of clause structure and predication (we will, however, come back to discourse
context motivating other aspects of negation in Section 3.4). According to Thompson,
this would explain the propensity of negation markers to appear near the main verb.4
Her account can be cast as domain minimization (MiD) in Hawkins’s (2004; see Section
2) terms: clausal negation targets the predication expressed by the verb, and grammars
prefer to keep the processing domain – in this case the distance between the negator and
the verb – as short as possible.


3.3. Number of negative markers


Languages may have one, two, three or even four negation markers in their standard
negation constructions (Dryer 2013a; Vossen & van der Auwera 2014). We have already
seen examples of one negation marker in (3)–(5). The other options are illustrated in
(6)–(8).


4
    The main interest in Thompson’s account is perhaps in explaining the placement of interrogatives. It is
because interrogatives participate in adjacency pairs that they tend to be placed clause-peripherally.
Negation lacks that characteristic and is therefore placed close to the verb just like other categories
intimately associated with the verb.


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(6)   French (Indo-European; constructed example)
      Elle      ne        viendra            pas
      3SG.F     NEG       come.FUT.3SG       NEG
      ‘She will not come.’


(7)   Nese (Austronesian; Crowley 2006: 70)
      ∅-se-be-yes-te
      3SG.R-NEG-NEG-walk-NEG
      ‘(S)he did not walk.’


(8)   Lewo (Austronesian; Early 1994: 405)
      pe-re          a-pim             re    poli
      NEG-NEG        3PL.SBJ-R.come NEG NEG
      ‘They didn’t come.’


The most common option cross-linguistically is to have one negative marker (Dryer
2013a). This is straightforwardly accounted for by general principles of economy, and it
thus falls under Hawkins’s (2004) MiF principle. Negative doubling is relatively
uncommon: in Dryer’s (2013a) sample of 1157 languages, 119 display double negation,
and triple (or quadruple) negation is extremely rare with only six languages showing
optional triple negation in Dryer (2013b). Negative doubling, tripling and quadrupling
are typically accounted for by the development known as Jespersen Cycle (Jespersen
[1917] 1962; Dahl 1979; van der Auwera 2009), whereby an item is routinely added to
a negative clause so that it is reanalysed as part of that construction, sometimes even
replacing the original negator. The classic example is the replacement of the French
solitary negator ne with the bipartite negative construction ne...pas (pas originally
meaning ‘step’ and being used as a minimizer to mean ‘not a step, not at all’), which in
present-day colloquial French has reduced to just post-verbal pas. While Jespersen
attributed this process to the phonological weakening of the original negator, a more
probable explanation is that the addition of the second negative element serves an
emphatic or clarifying function (see van der Auwera 2009 for discussion). Negative
doubling would therefore represent a syntacticization of a discourse pattern in which
negation receives special emphasis or clarification, thus corresponding to the early stages



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Miestamo, Shagal, Silvennoinen                                            Typology and usage


of Givón’s schema in (1) in Section 2. For example, Hansen and Visconti’s (2009)
diachronic corpus study of French and Italian suggests that, at least in these languages,
negative doubling first emerged in contexts where discourse-active concepts were
negated, which would lend support to the view that emphasis drives negative doubling
(but see Schwenter 2006 for a critique of the notion of emphasis). This explanation arises
from the discourse context of negation that will also play a central role in explaining
some asymmetries between affirmatives and negatives that we will turn to in the next
section.


3.4. Symmetry and asymmetry of negatives vis-à-vis affirmatives


Looking at the structure of the negative beyond the negative marker, Miestamo (2005)
made a distinction between symmetric and asymmetric negation according to whether
or not negatives differ from affirmatives by anything else than the mere presence of the
negative marker(s), and then further distinguishing a number of subtypes of asymmetric
negation according to the nature of the structural differences.
   Symmetry and asymmetry can be observed between constructions and paradigms. If
there is no other difference between a negative and its affirmative counterpart than the
presence of the negative marker(s), we are dealing with a symmetric construction as in
the Daga example (9). Asymmetric constructions, on the other hand, mean further
structural differences between the negative and the affirmative, e.g. in Forest Enets (10)
where the negative marker is an auxiliary verb carrying the finite verbal inflections and
the lexical verb is in an invariable connegative form. Symmetric paradigms show a one-
to-one correspondence between the paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives as in
Romanian (11), whereas in asymmetric paradigms the correspondences are not one-to-
one, e.g. in Burmese (12), where the affirmative paradigm makes a distinction between
actual, potential and perfect but the negative has only one form corresponding to all
three and these distinctions made in the affirmative are lost in the negative.

(9)   Daga (Dagan; Murane 1974: 113, 115)

      a. wat agoat mum-en
           help      OBJ.FOC.3PL-3
           ‘He helped them.’


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      b. ya     wat agoat mum-en
         NEG    help         OBJ.FOC.3PL-3
         ‘He didn’t help them.’

(10) Forest Enets (Uralic; Siegl 2015: 47)

      a. mud' Dudinka-xan          d'iri-đʔ
         1SG Dudinka-LOC.SG live-1SG
         ‘I live in Dudinka.’
      b. mud' Dudinka-xan          ńi-đʔ       d'iri-ʔ
         1SG Dudinka-LOC.SG NEG-1SG live-CNG
         ‘I do not live in Dudinka.’


(11) Romanian (Indo-European; constructed examples)

      a. (a) cânta ‘to sing’ PRS              b. (a) cânta ‘to sing’ IMPF
                AFF       NEG                       AFF          NEG
         1SG    cânt      nu cânt                   cântam       nu cântam
         2SG    cânţi     nu cânţi                  cântai       nu cântai
         3SG    cântă     nu cântă                  cânta        nu cânta
         1PL    cântăm    nu cântăm                 cântam       nu cântam
         2PL    cântaţi   nu cântaţi                cântaţi      nu cântaţi
         3PL    cântă     nu cântă                  cântau       nu cântau


(12) Burmese (Sino-Tibetan; Cornyn 1944: 12–13)


      a. θwâ-dé              b. θwâ-mé          c. θwâ-bí
         go-ACT                 go-POT              go-PERF
         ‘goes, went’           ‘will go’           ‘has gone’
      d. ma-θwâ-bû
         NEG-go-NEG

         ‘does/did/will not go, has not gone’


Note that in the Romanian example the construction is symmetric too, while in Burmese
the construction is asymmetric – it is not a simple addition of negative markers to an


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otherwise identical affirmative as the suffixal part of the negative marker replaces the
tense-aspect-mood markers. This does not, however, mean that there is a direct
dependency between the (a)symmetry in constructions and paradigms, but they are
(partly) independent dimensions. Cross-cutting the constructional vs. paradigmatic
distinction, types of asymmetry can be identified on the basis of which domain is affected
by the asymmetry and how, but we need not discuss the types in more detail here.
     One type of asymmetry is, however, especially relevant to the present discussion.
Paradigmatic asymmetry whereby grammatical distinctions available in affirmatives are
not available in negatives is rather common in the world’s languages. In many languages,
grammatical         disctinctions,    especially    tense-aspect-mood        distinctions,    made     in
affirmatives are unavailable in negatives. One example of this can be seen in the Burmese
examples in (12) above, where one form in the negative corresponds to three distinctions
in the paradigm used in the affirmative.
     One possible usage-based explanation for such paradigmatic neutralization can be cast
in terms of typological markedness. In Section 3.1 we noted that the behavioural
potential of marked categories is lower than that of unmarked ones. There are two
aspects of behavioural potential: paradigmatic5 potential and distributional potential.
The lower paradigmatic potential of the marked category means that a lower number of
paradigmatic distinctions are available in the marked category than in the unmarked
one, and lower distributional potential means that the marked category can itself appear
in a smaller number of contexts than the unmarked one. The paradigmatic potential of
negation is lower than that of affirmation – we just saw that it is rather common in the
world’s languages that a smaller number of grammatical distinctions are made in the
paradigm in the negative than in the affirmative. As for distributional potential, negatives
cannot occur in all contexts in which affirmatives can, and languages may for example
restrict the occurrence of negation in subordinate clauses. An economy-based
explanation for the lower behavioural potential of the marked category refers to the
lower frequency of the marked category: it is more economical to restrict the behavioural
potential of the marked category, which is less frequent in discourse than its unmarked
counterpart (see e.g. Haspelmath 2006). This is the general frequency explanation


5
    Croft (2003: 294) uses the term inflectional potential but here we follow Miestamo (2007) in using the
more general term paradigmatic potential.


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applicable to any markedness pattern where a clear difference in discourse frequency
can be observed. We saw in 3.1 that there is evidence for the lower discourse frequency
of negation vis-à-vis affirmation.
   The general frequency-based explanation for marked categories can play a partial role
in explaining paradigmatic neutralization in negatives. However, as noted by Miestamo
(2007), if the general frequency-based explanation was the whole story, then one would
expect other marked categories, such as polar interrogatives, to exhibit similar tendencies
for neutralization, but they turn out to show much less neutralization across languages
than negatives do. A more negation-specific usage-based explanation for the
paradigmatic asymmetry whereby grammatical distinctions available in affirmatives are
not available in negatives has been proposed by Miestamo (2005). As noted by Givón
(1978), negatives differ from affirmatives as to their discourse context. They typically
occur in contexts where the corresponding affirmative, the content to be negated, is in
some way present; either it has been explicitly uttered or there are other reasons why
the speaker believes that the hearer might hold the negated content for true and therefore
has a reason to negate it. Negation becomes relevant and informative in such a context.
Imagine the following brief dialogue (13) about a potentially misbehaving dog.


(13) A: Oh, King Arthur didn't bite anyone!
      B: Erm... why... was he supposed to do that, does he usually bite people?


If A produces such a negative out of the blue, without the idea of King Arthur biting
people in the air, supposed in the context, B’s reaction is likely to be puzzled as in the
example. On the other hand, if A and B had earlier discussed King Arthur’s tendency to
go around biting people, A’s utterance would be completely felicitous. The discourse
context of negation is proposed as a motivation for the less specific marking of
grammatical categories in negatives than in affirmatives. The idea behind this proposed
motivation is that with the corresponding affirmative present in the context, all aspects
of the negated situation/event need not be as specifically marked – there is less need to
specify its temporal, aspectual or modal properties or its participants in the negative than
in the affirmative – and in many languages, this discourse preference has
grammaticalized as neutralization of grammatical distinctions in negatives. Such a
discourse preference should be present in all languages while it has been



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conventionalized as grammatical constraints in some languages only. The discourse
preference should show not only in the use of grammatical elements, but also in the use
of more lexical elements, e.g. as the lower degree of use of adverbials of time, place or
manner and the lower degree of use of overt expressions of clausal participants such as
subjects, objects and indirect objects.
   In our ongoing work (Miestamo et al. in prep.), we have set out to test this hypothesis
using corpus data. In our preliminary data from English conversations, negatives do
indeed seem to show a lower number of spatial and temporal adverbials compared to
affirmatives, while in manner adverbials there is no clear difference. For adverbials that
express stance, the pattern is, however, reversed. Such differences related to types of
adverbials show that in addition to the marked discourse context of negation, other
factors such as verb semantics need to be taken into account in refining the hypothesis.
For example, negation has a well-known tendency to appear with mental verbs (Biber et
al. 1999: 174), which seldom have spatial specifications (Hasselgård 2010: 192).
   Another cross-linguistically recurring asymmetry between affirmation and negation
concerns the marking of NPs under negation (Miestamo 2014). In many Circum-Baltic
languages (Finnic, Baltic, Slavic), NPs under the scope of negation are marked with a
case that has partitive semantics, and in a number of languages across the world, e.g.
many Bantu languages and many Oceanic languages, indefinite NPs under the scope of
negation are marked as non-referential. Araki provides an illustrative example (14).


(14) Araki (Austronesian; Alexandre François, p.c.)


      a. nam      les-i-a             jau         lo   lep̈ a
         1SG.R    see-OBJ.REF-3SG coconut.crab LOC ground
         ‘I've seen a/the coconut crab on the ground.’
      b. nam      je    les      re   jau         lo   lep̈ a
         1SG.R    NEG   see PAR coconut.crab LOC ground
         ‘I haven't seen a/any coconut crab on the ground.’
      c. nam      je    les-i-a             jau        lo       lep̈ a
         1SG.R    NEG   see-OBJ.REF-3SG coconut.crab LOC ground
         ‘I haven't seen the coconut crab on the ground.’
         [but not *‘I haven't seen a coconut crab on the ground.’]


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In realis affirmatives (14a), objects appear as bare noun phrases and the verb has marking
for referential object and person-number cross-reference. In the negative (14b), the
object is marked by the partitive marker re and there is no cross-reference on the verb.
Referential marking and cross-reference on the verb may occur in negatives, but then the
reading is definite (14c); in this case re does not occur. The partitive marker in Araki is
essentially a marker of non-referentiality. Givón (1978) noted this phenomenon in a
number of Bantu languages and proposed to explain it by the discourse properties of
negation: negatives do not bring new referential participants into discourse; new
participants are introduced in affirmative sentences and when they appear in negatives
they are discourse-old and therefore definite (see also Sosa 2015 for some relevant
discourse data on Eastern Khanty). Miestamo’s (2014) survey of the marking of NPs
under negation showed that grammaticalized effects of negation on the marking of NPs
are not very common across languages, but they do occur in different parts of the world
and the overall tendency is for (indefinite) NPs to be marked as non-referential under
negation; the Circum-Baltic cases with partitive semantics can also be linked to non-
referentiality as partitives, referring to masses, have a lower degree of individuation in
their semantics. Givón's discourse explanation can be evoked for the overall typological
tendency (see Miestamo 2014 for more discussion).
   In Section 3, we have discussed a number of cross-linguistic generalizations regarding
different aspects of negation for which usage-based explanations have been proposed in
the literature. All these proposed explanations were distinctively pragmatic in nature,
referring to discourse frequency and the discourse context of negation. In a usage-based
view of grammar, all grammatical patterns emerge from discourse, even such where the
ultimate reason is more semantic in nature. For example, the tendency of negation to
receive irrealis mood marking in many languages is based on the semantic link between
negation and irrealis (see Miestamo 2005: 208-209), but its conventionalization as a
grammatical pattern in a language happens via recurring use in discourse. In this paper,
we are mainly focusing on more pragmatically-based explanations.


4. Negation in clause combining


As noted above, the domain of negation can be divided into a number of typologically
salient subdomains. Negation in clause combining is the main focus of our ongoing work,


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in which our goals are two-fold: on the one hand, to survey the cross-linguistic variation
that languages show in this subdomain of negation and to account for these typological
findings from a usage-based perspective, and on the other hand, to use the domain as a
case in a theoretical and methodological discussion of the relationship between cross-
linguistic variation and discourse preferences. In this section, we will discuss the current
state and the prospects of our research programme, presenting what is currently known
about negation in clause combining from a typological perspective and discussing
possible ways of applying usage-based explanations in this domain. As we will argue
further below, negation in clause combining offers promising perspectives for such
theoretical and methodological development.
   Negation in clause combining has not received much attention in the typological
literature. In general, the most studied phenomenon in this domain is Neg-Raising, or
Neg-Transport, which specifially concerns complement clauses. Both terms are used to
refer to the near equivalence of sentences like I don’t think that it happened and I think
that it didn’t happen with negative marking in the main and the subordinate clause
respectively (see e.g. Fillmore 1963; Ross 1973; Bartsch 1973; Horn 1978a, [1989]
2001). However, despite the wealth of studies on Neg-Raising in individual languages,
to our knowledge, no large-scale cross-linguistic work has been carried out on it. Bond
(2011) provides a more general overview of negation in clause combining, both in
subordination and coordination, focusing primarily on the locus of negation (where
negation is formally marked) and the scope of negation. However, his paper is based on
data from a few selected languages and, thus, is not itself a broad typological study of
negation in clause combining, but rather provides methodological insights for further
cross-linguistic investigations on the topic. Some other typological studies addressed
negation in specific types of subordinate clauses, e.g. Schmidtke-Bode (2009) in purpose
clauses, Hetterle (2015) in adverbial clauses, Shagal (2019) in participial relative clauses,
and Mauri and Sansò (2019) in circumstantial clauses. Finally, Salaberri (in press)
discusses the phenomenon of emphatic negative coordination (e.g. English neither... nor)
across languages.
   Although currently understudied, negation in clause combining clearly has a lot to
offer to the general typology and our understanding of negation, as it often builds on the
more familiar domains – such as standard negation and negative imperatives – but differs
from them significantly in many respects. To the extent that negation in complex



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sentences is similar to negation in simple main clauses, we may expect that a lot of what
was said about standard negation and its functional underpinnings in Section 3 is valid
for negation in complex sentences as well. However, our main interest is in how negation
in complex sentences differs from main clause negation and how such differences can be
accounted for in a usage-based perspective.
   In general, negation in clause combining provides a substantial amount of previously
neglected data that can shed light on the functioning of negation. Indeed, when the scope
of research is expanded from a single clause to a combination of clauses, we encounter a
number of new negative markers, negative structures, rules and tendencies related to
negation. When we study a combination of clauses instead of a single clause,
fundamentally new research questions also arise, e.g. those related to the scope of
negation as an operator (see Bickel 2010: 58–60). Subordinate clauses can differ with
respect to their function (complement clauses, adverbial clauses, relative clauses),
syntactic relation to the main clause (embedded vs. non-embedded), degree of
desententialization (from extremely finite to extremely non-finite), and a number of more
fine-grained parameters, such as, for instance, the semantics of individual clause types.
All of these parameters may interact with negation in many complex ways, and
investigating these ways can provide a perspective for a richer account of negation as a
multifaceted phenomenon. In addition, when the focus of research is on negation in main
clauses, different types are normally considered separately, such as negation of
declarative verbal main clauses and negation of imperatives. However, if we consider
clause combining, these different types can interact, for instance as alternative negators
in certain types of subordinate clauses.
   Clause combining seems like a promising direction in the research on negation in the
usage-based perspective, as well. Importantly, a number of generalizations concerning
negation outlined in Section 3 are also true of subordination and subordinate
constructions. Similarly to negation, subordination is marked in the sense of Croft
(2003). Verbs prototypically denote action and their basic pragmatic function is that of
predication, but in the context of subordination they are often used for reference (e.g. in
complement clauses) or modification (e.g. in relative clauses). Such a mismatch between
semantics and pragmatics results in markedness, which manifests itself, among other
things, in lack of verbal inflection, expression of nominal categories on verbs, or coding



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of arguments as nominal dependents, such as possessors or obliques; see Cristofaro
(2003: 260–261). In addition, dependent situations in the context of subordination are
often expressed by non-declarative clause structures, which are marked with respect to
the declarative ones: they are less frequent in discourse and display reduced behavioural
potential (i.e. occur in a limited number of different grammatical contexts, and show less
distinctions in inflectional forms); see Cristofaro (2003: 58). A combination of
subordination and negation is thereby situated at the intersection of two typologically
marked phenomena, which may be expected to lead to effects worth investigating. The
combination of two relatively infrequent phenomena can be expected to be rather rare
in discourse, which offers a frequency based account for the high degree of markedness
of negation in subordinate clauses. The occurrence of such a combination in discourse
requires a particular pragmatic context. Discovering the contexts that favour the use of
negative subordinate structures is an important step towards understanding the discourse
basis of cross-linguistic variation in this domain and will therefore be one of the research
foci in our project.
   In what follows, we will address these issues in more concrete terms. The discussion
will take up a number of cross-linguistically recurring structural properties of negation
in complex sentences, drawing mainly from the data collected so far in our ongoing work
but also from observations made in earlier literature. In connection with the structural
properties discussed, we will address possible ways of getting at the usage-based
underpinnings of the typological findings. Our preliminary survey of negation in
subordinate clauses (Miestamo et al. 2019), based on a genealogically and areally
stratified pilot sample of 50 languages, shows that in almost all languages standard
negation can be used to negate subordinate clauses, or at least some types of subordinate
clauses. For instance, in English, a negative main clause He is not sleeping right now can
appear as a negative complement clause with no further adjustments: I know that he is
not sleeping right now. On the other hand, there also exist many recurrent differences that
negative subordinate clauses can show with respect to negative main clauses in various
languages. The main differences observed so far will be discussed in the remainder of
this section: different negative markers being used in dependent vs. main clauses, the
position of negative markers differing in dependent vs. main clauses, paradigmatic
asymmetries between negative and positive dependent clauses, differences in word order




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in negative vs. positive dependent clauses, fusion of negative markers with conjunctions,
and the non-negatability of some types of dependent clauses.
   To begin with, the negative marker used in subordinate clauses can differ from the
negative marker used in main clauses. In some languages, specialized markers are used
in any kind of subordinate clauses, e.g. in Welsh (15), while in other languages their use
might be restricted to specific types of forms, such as non-indicative or non-finite, e.g. in
Lezgian (16). Some of such markers belong to the nominal rather than verbal domain,
e.g. the abessive case marker in Udmurt (17), which signals desententialization of the
subordinate clause (see Lehmann 1988). Moreover, there are also languages that can
express negation in non-main clauses by means of specialized negative non-finite forms,
which are not derived from the respective affirmative forms, e.g. in Kambaata (18).


(15) Welsh (Indo-European; Borsley et al. 2007: 263)

      a. Nid yw                  Gwyn      yn     darllen.
         NEG    be.FUT.3SG       Gwyn PROG read.INF
         ‘Gwyn isn’t reading.’
      b. Gwn                 i [nad        yw           Gwyn      yn       darllen].
         know.FUT.1SG        I    NEG      be.PRS.3SG gwyn        PROG     read.INF
         ‘I know Gwyn isn’t reading.’


(16) Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian; Haspelmath 1993: 133, 127)

      a. gu-zwa                    b. gu-zwa-č
         give-IPFV                      give-IPFV-NEG
         ‘he gives’                     ‘he does not give’
      c. fi-zwa-j                  d. te-fi-zwa-j
         go-IPFV-PTCP                   NEG-go-IPFV-PTCP
         ‘the one that goes’            ‘the one that does not go’


(17) Udmurt (Uralic; Edygarova 2015: 283, 278)

      a. tir-tek                   b. mi        virǯili-tek puk-ko-m
         hammer-ABE                     1PL stir-ABE         sit-PRS-1PL
         ‘without a hammer’             ‘We are sitting without stirring.’


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(18) Kambaata (Afro-Asiatic; Treis 2008: 171, 180)

      a. [cíil-at                it-tumb-úta]             inchch-áta
          baby.girl-F.NOM        eat-3F.PTCP.NEG-F.ACC food-F.ACC
         ‘the food that the baby girl does not eat’
      b. [bux-íchch-u            it-anó]          bar-í        móoq-ut
          poor-SG-M.NOM          eat-3M.IPFV.PTCP day-M.ACC spoon-F.NOM
         ba’-áa’a
         disappear-3F.IPFV
         ‘On the day when a poor man has some food to eat his spoon can’t be found.’


Relating such special markers of negation in subordinate clauses to possible explanatory
factors, we may pay attention for example to a certain overlap between negation and
subordination as regards the locus of coding. Cross-linguistically, subordination can be
signalled by a number of different formal means including subordinating conjunctions,
specialized pronominal elements, etc. However, one of the most common ways to encode
subordination is the dependent clause predicate itself (as illustrated by but not limited
to non-finite verb forms). That is, the locus of negation marking is often the same or close
to the locus of subordination marking, which facilitates interaction between the two
domains. Diachronically, this may contribute to the development of specialized negative
dependent forms, which sometimes evolve from a combination of standard negators with
markers of non-finite forms. Such a development has been reported in Aguaruna
(Jivaroan), where the negative relativizer -tʃau is historically derived from a
negator ‑tʃa and a relativizer -u but has developed enough idiosyncratic properties to be
analyzed as an independent form (Overall 2007: 68).
   Sometimes the special negators used in dependent clauses are not dedicated
dependent-clause negators, but recruited from domains of main-clause negation other
than standard negation. Such cases may pertain to a wider range of structures, or even
to non-main clauses as a whole, while others are specific to particular types of
subordinate clauses, such as the use of prohibitives in purposive clauses as shown in (19)
from Jamsay Dogon.




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(19) Jamsay Dogon (Dogon; Heath 2008: 640)
      kònòŋó          kònòŋó       [kó       kûːn] náːná-bà
      conical.roof make.roof NONH on                put.on-IPFV-3PL.SBJ
      [kó       nò] [àr á mìn-sà-Ø
                          n
                                                kâːn] sòjò-ý
       NONH     now rain fall-RES-3SG.SBJ even leak-PROH
      ‘They build a conical roof and put it on top of it (=granary), so that it won’t leak
      now even if the rain falls.’


Usage-based explanations of such specializations will pay attention to functional
connections between the categories involved, e.g. purposives and prohibitives.
   Some languages show differences in the placement of negative markers in dependent
clauses as compared to their placement in main clauses. For example in Swedish, the
negative marker occurs before the verb in dependent clauses while its default position is
postverbal in main clauses. One promising avenue of research will be to study
systematically the difference in the position of negation markers in dependent vs.
independent clauses, both across languages and in discourse data. This will allow us to
see whether there is a tendency for negators in dependent clauses to appear earlier than
in main clauses, to what extent discourse preferences reflect cross-linguistic variation,
and what the effects of factors like NegFirst and MiD are on negation in dependent vs.
independent clauses.
   In some languages, we find cases where a negative construction used in some types of
dependent clauses has a double marker of negation while main clauses use single
negative markers, e.g. Fon (Atlantic-Congo: Kwa) and Kilmeri (Border) where double
negation is found in conditional clauses. The opposite case – double negation in main
clauses but single negation in subordinate clauses – has not been found in our data so
far. This is interesting and somewhat counter to our expectations, as it has earlier been
observed that double negation, when arising via a Jespersen Cycle, is likely to appear in
main clauses first and spread to subordinate clauses later (see Hansen and Visconti 2009).
In any case, more languages need to be surveyed to see whether this really is a cross-
linguistically recurring phenomenon.
   In addition to the differences in the form, position and number of the negative markers
themselves, negative subordinate clauses show other peculiarities with respect to positive



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subordinate clauses and negation in main clauses. In particular, specialized negative non-
finite forms can demonstrate various types of asymmetries pertaining to different
categories that may not be relevant for standard negation; see Shagal 2019: 178–183 for
an overview of this phenomenon in participles. For example, as shown in Table 2, Finnish
has five affirmative participles, which differ both in their relativizing capacity (whether
they relativize subjects or direct objects) and in their temporal meaning (present vs.
past). The single negative participle, on the other hand, can not only act as a negative
counterpart for all the affirmative forms, but is also able to relativize some non-core
participants, such as locative or temporal adverbials (Shagal 2019: 94–95). As mentioned
earlier, asymmetries in tense-aspect-mood are attested in standard negation as well, but
the loss of distinctions in relativizing capacity is specific to relative clauses and,
therefore, cannot be discovered if we consider clauses in isolation.


                 Temporal reference      Subject-oriented      Direct object-oriented
                                                               Agent not expressed      Agent expressed
 Affirmative     Present                         -va                   -tava
                                                                                              -ma
                 Past                            -nut                   -tu
 Negative        Present
                                                                     -maton
                 Past


                                 Table 2: Participial paradigm in Finnish


Discourse-based explanations for such paradigmatic asymmetries between negative and
positive dependent clauses may be proposed along the same lines as for similar
asymmetries between negative and affirmative main clauses, referring to the discourse
context of negation and frequency. More specific hypotheses need to be formulated and
tested in discourse data. Attention will be paid for example to the type of subordinate
clause: whether specialized negative participles, negative converbs and negative
nominalizations behave the same way in terms of neutralization, whether explanations
can be found in some discourse properties of relative, adverbial, and complement clauses,
respectively, and whether the degree of nominalization/desententialization plays a role.
   Furthermore, it is interesting to note that subordinate clauses (and, more generally,
clauses in the situation of clause combining) show asymmetries vis-à-vis independent
clauses very similar to those found between negatives and affirmatives. For instance,


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verb forms that are typically used in dependent clauses are often not inflected for the
same categories as verbs in independent clauses, e.g. tense, aspect, mood, or person. And
even if they are inflected for the same categories, they commonly display a reduced set
of internal distinctions (see Cristofaro 2003: 57). As discussed in Section 3.4, a possible
explanation for such paradigmatic asymmetries in negation is that in order for a negative
utterance to make sense, a corresponding affirmative utterance needs to be somehow
present in the background, either explicitly or implicitly. In a similar way, subordinate
clauses often depend on main clauses in the interpretation of the verbal categories, such
as tense, and participants of the situation. In other words, underspecification of various
properties of the situation is characteristic of both negation and subordination, so this is
yet another aspect in which a more detailed understanding of the specific discourse
contexts of negative subordinate clauses can provide insights into cross-linguistic
variation in structural patterns.
   Other ways in which negative subordinate clauses may differ from negative main
clauses include changes in word order patterns. For example Basque shows more
flexibility in subordinate clauses as opposed to main clauses (Hualde & Ortiz de Urbina
2003: 523). Salaberri (2021) provides a diachronic account of this difference, making
also a connection to the pragmatic backgroundedness of subordinate clauses. Information
structure is one further parameter to be taken into account in examining the discourse
properties of negative main vs. subordinate clauses.
   Negators in dependent clauses have also been observed to fuse with other elements.
Apart from dependent verb forms (as in the case of Aguaruna mentioned above), this can
also concern subordinating conjunctions. In Finnish, it is common that the negative
auxiliary e- occurs right after the conjunction and fuses with it, e.g. että ‘that’ + et
NEG.2SG   > ettet ‘that you don’t’; jos ‘if’ + et NEG.2SG > jollet ‘if you don’t’. Here we may
pay attention to possible typology-discourse correlations with respect to how frequent it
is for different dependent clause types to be negated, expecting more fusion and even
specialized negative conjunctions (such as lest and unless in English) in clause types that
more commonly occur with negation (e.g. complements, conditional clauses) than some
other clause types do.
   Finally, an important phenomenon observed for some subordinate structures is their
inability    to   be    independently       negated.        This   is   often   considered   a   result



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of desententialization (see Lehmann 1988: for an example from Popti’,6 Mayan, and
general discussion), and, therefore, is yet another effect that can only be properly
investigated in the context of clause combining. Relatedly, Horn (1978b: 191) refers to
‘a constraint against negation in non-finite embedded clauses’; an example is the relative
strangeness of sentences like I want not to work compared to I don’t want to work (Givón
1978: 95). Correlating such discourse preferences, e.g. in English, with more
grammaticalized restrictions in cases like Popti’ and Finnish will shed light on the
relationship between cross-linguistic variation and variation in discourse and provide
potential usage-based explanations for the cross-linguistic variation.


5. Conclusion


In this paper, we have laid out the theoretical and methodological foundations of a
research project that addresses negation in clause combining in a typological and usage-
based perspective, illustrating the discussion with empirical data coming mainly from
our ongoing work. We hope to have shown that negation lends itself particularly well to
examining the relationship between cross-linguistic variation and discourse preferences
through empirical work and that it therefore provides an excellent testing ground for the
more general theoretical questions in the focus of our project. First of all, it is a highly
frequent and easily identifiable element in usage data, which is an obvious
methodological advantage. Negation is universally present in languages and negative
constructions can be identified across languages without problems. Negation, while
having a relatively simple semantic core, has its own special pragmatic properties, which
leads to a variety of discourse effects that we can try to relate to cross-linguistic patterns.
We have further argued that negation in the context of clause combining provides
particularly interesting perspectives into usage-based explanations of cross-linguistic
patterns as the combination of these two domains is expected to create specific discourse
conditions that may affect linguistic structure in various ways. Uncovering these factors
is a central theme in our subsequent work, which will consist of the following main
components: We will address and evaluate discourse-based explanations of typological
patterns in the domain of standard negation. We will survey cross-linguistic structural


6
    Referred to as Jacaltec in Lehmann (1988).


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variation in the domain of negation in clause combining and try to account for it in a
usage-based perspective. Our work on the discourse factors relevant in explaining cross-
linguistic variation in negation will then, hopefully, feed back to the more general
theoretical-methodological discussion of the relationship between typology and language
use.
      As is obvious from the discussion in the preceding sections, we are by no means the
first ones to propose the idea that explanations for cross-linguistic variation can be found
in language use. However, usage-based explanations proposed by typologists are rarely
backed up with concrete studies of usage, but rather proposed as hypotheses that remain
to be tested. In our work, we will put the proposed explanations to test using empirical
discourse data. Looking at negation in discourse, we will first ask how frequent selected
properties of negation are and in which ways they are conditioned by other discourse
preferences. This will lead to the further question to what extent these discourse
preferences correlate with cross-linguistic preferences and to what extent we can use the
discourse preferences to account for cross-linguistic variation. And ultimately, we will
be in a position to estimate whether these observations give support to the PGCH, for
example, and whether they are in line with similar observations in other domains beyond
negation. Examining negation across languages and within discourse will allow us to
gain new insights into the question why grammar is shaped the way it is.



Abbreviations

1= 1st person                         IMPF   = imperfect          PL   = plural
2=2     nd
             person                   INF   = infinitive          POT   = potential
3 = 3rd person                        IPFV=imperfective           PROG   = progressive
ABE   = abessive                      LOC   = locative            PROH   = prohibitive
ACC   = accusative                    M   = masculine             PRS   = present
ACT   = actual                        NEG   = negative            PTCP   = participle
AFF   = affirmative                   NOM    = nominative         R   = realis
CNG   = connegative                   NONH    = nonhuman          REF   = referential
F   = feminine                        OBJ   = object              RES   = resultative
FOC   = focus                         PAR   = partitive           SBJ   = subject
FUT   = future                        PERF   = perfect            SG   = singular




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CONTACT
matti.miestamo@helsinki.fi
ksenia.shagal@gmail.com
olli.silvennoinen@helsinki.fi




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