10.6092/issn.2785-0943/15153
This paper makes two main claims: the presence of two or more negative elements in Negative Concord, Negative Comparison, and Expletive Negation basically rests upon the pragmatic need of intensifying the negative import of the sentence. Secondly, the paper aims at identifying a possible path of functional expansion that may account for the use of the Expletive Negation in the constructions under scrutiny. Expletive Negation is originally tied to the core concept of inequality comparison (x is more/has more y than z, where y refers to a state, a quality or property), as well as to temporal comparison (x before y)–where the second member is implicitly negated; it may then expand to other constructions such as Negative Concord and the construction of fear verbs.
application/pdf
2785-0943
15153
2
en
Paolo Ramat
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
Pragmatic strategy
Expletive negation and related problems
Text.Serial.Journal
https://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it/
2
Research articles
2022-12-22
2022-07-06
2022-12-22
2022-12-22
1-38
LTC
Paolo Ramat
2022/12/22
10.6092/issn.2785-0943/15153
1
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome
2785-0943
2
Pragmatic strategy
en
38
<p>Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1997. <em>Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. </em>New York: Oxford University Press.</p>
Expletive negation and related problems
https://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it/article/download/15153/15265
2
            Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38    ISSN 2785-0943



              Expletive negation and related problems

                                        PAOLO RAMAT
                           ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE DEI LINCEI - ROMA


                    Submitted: 06/07/2022 Revised version: 31/10/2022
                       Accepted: 31/10/2022        Published: 22/12/2022


    There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your Philosophy
                                                              W. Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.167-8.
              ‘Ci sono più cose in cielo e in terra, Orazio, / che non ne sogni la tua scienza’


                                                                 Não sou nada. /Nunca serei nada.
                                                   ‘Non sono niente. / I will never be anything.’
                                                                      Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria




                                             Abstract
This paper makes two main claims: the presence of two or more negative elements in Negative
Concord, Negative Comparison, and Expletive Negation basically rests upon the pragmatic
need of intensifying the negative import of the sentence. Secondly, the paper aims at
identifying a possible path of functional expansion that may account for the use of the
Expletive Negation in the constructions under scrutiny. Expletive Negation is originally tied
to the core concept of inequality comparison (x is more/has more y than z, where y refers to
a state, a quality or property), as well as to temporal comparison (x before y) – where the
second member is implicitly negated; it may then expand to other constructions such as
Negative Concord and the construction of fear verbs.


Keywords: Double Negation, Equative and Negative comparison, Expletive negation,
Negative concord, Fear verbs, Pragmatic strategy.




1. Introduction and Summary


More than 20 years ago, taking advantage of a stimulating article by Carlotta Viti on
the equatives in RgVeda (Viti 2002), I wrote a note on the negative comparison
(Ramat 2002). Since then, the literature on negative comparison (henceforth


https://doi.org//10.6092/issn.2785-0943/15153                                                  1
Ramat                                                   Expletive negation and related problems


NegComp) has experienced a real boom, including a thread of LINGTYP1 (January
2022) on ‘Negation marks adverbial clauses’ with interesting examples from many
different languages. Moreover, Johan van der Auwera and Chiara Gianollo, at the
55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Bucharest 2022),
organized a workshop on “A hundred years of negative concord”. Therefore, I felt
myself pushed to reconsider the issue based on the many publications that offer
different viewpoints, and consequently different answers.
     NegComp (for instance, Paris is not as big as Tokyo) cannot be considered in
isolation since it reveals deep connections with other phenomena concerning negative
constructs, such as negative concord (NegConc: for instance, I did not never hear such
a song) and expletive negation (EN: for instance, It. questo discorso è più pericoloso di
quel che tu non creda ‘this speech is more dangerous than you (*not) believe’). Starting
with the statement that “[n]egation is one of the few truly universal grammatical
categories: every language seems to have some grammaticalized means to deny the
truth of an ordinary declarative sentence” (Willis et al. 2013: 1), I agree with Garzonio
and Poletto’s conclusions (2015: 147) that “negation is not a simple element […] but
a complex one, formed as the result of the interaction of several abstract processes”
that have to do not only with grammatical categories but also with the cognitive and
pragmatic behaviour of the speakers.
     The received opinion is that negative concord (NegConc) is a separate phenomenon
from expletive negation (EN), while NegComp and negation with fear verbs are
traditionally assumed to be subtypes of EN. In the following sections, I shall consider
the four negative constructs separately to uncover the ‘red thread’ uniting not only
EN,   NegComp, and negation with ‘fear verbs’, but also NegConc.
     The question of the so-called ‘Negative Concord’, though apparently different from
NegComp, has several contact points with the latter, at least from the theoretical point
of view.
     The main points of the negative expressions that do not concern the standard
negation marked by ¬ (i.e., the so-called polarity NEG), namely, the negation of the
truth of an affirmation (p: Paul likes ice cream à ¬p: Paul does not like ice cream), are
Negative Concord, Negative Comparison, Expletive Negation, and Expletive Negation
with Fear Verbs. The aim of the following sections is to discuss each of these points
and to provide a key to understanding their interconnections. I will start from
Expletive Negation as a useful point of departure.

1
    lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org


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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


     Expletive negation is dealt with in Section 2, followed by the discussion of Negative
Concord in Section 3 and of Negative Comparison in Section 4. Negation with fear
verbs is treated in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 discusses whether the expletive
negation is always, or has always been, expletive and suggests an explanatory
hypothesis for its diffusion.


2. Expletive Negation


A useful starting point to treat the problems alluded to is the so-called ‘expletive
negation’, which, as we will see in many of the following examples, occurs quite often,
particularly in non-standard language varieties. EN and its equivalents like ‘vacuous’,
‘pleonastic’, ‘abusive NEG’, commonly refer to the presence of a negative marker that
does not give a negative sense to the utterance. For a more detailed and restrictive
definition of EN, see below Jin & Koenig (2021: 41). Not much attention was
traditionally paid to EN: in descriptive/prescriptive grammars, it was even
disapproved of as useless and disturbing to the logic of the sentence.2 Even recent
comprehensive descriptions of Negation and its diachronic evolutions do not pay
much attention to this largely and crosslinguistically diffused phenomenon; for
instance, in Larrivée & Ingham’s collective volume on the evolution of NEG (2011)
there is no ‘expletive (or pleonastic, vacuous, abusive) negation’ entry in the subject
index. The same holds for Mosegaard Hansen & Visconti (2014), and Miestamo
(2017). On the contrary, in the ten languages considered as case studies by Willis et
al. (2013), the term EN appears with reference to the Italo-Romance, (High) German,


2
    Delfitto et al. (2019: 58) are right in stating that   EN   has received less attention in the literature
concerning negation. However, already in 2002, Nocentini (not quoted in Delfitto et al.) had studied
the following cases in connection with the ‘so-called expletive negation’ in Italian: dubitative
interrogatives (mi domando se non ci siamo-IND/SBJ.PRS comportati male ‘I ask myself whether we
behaved badly’); exclamatives (che cosa non darei-COND.PRS per vederla contenta! ‘what I would (not)
give in order to see her be happy!’); comparatives (la strada è più pericolosa di quel che tu non creda-
SBJ.PRS   ‘the road is more dangerous than you believe’); ‘verba timendi’ constructions (temo che non sia-
SBJ.PRS   vero when meaning ‘I’m afraid it is true’); and some particular constructions such as the
temporal one using finché (rimasero a giocare finché non si stufarono-IND.PST ‘they kept playing until
they got tired’ or ‘finché non telefoni-SBJ.PRS qualcuno ‘until someone will call’) and the avertives (c’è
mancato poco che non cadessi-SBJ.IMPF ‘I almost fell (but I didn’t)’. Some of these constructions will be
discussed in the following pages. To my knowledge, the most exhaustive description of the                 EN

properties is Delfitto’s chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Negation (Delfitto 2020).


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Ramat                                                         Expletive negation and related problems


Low German and Dutch, Brythonic Celtic, Ancient and Modern Greek, and Slavonic
languages. Jin (2021: 49) states that EN


       occurs rather widely. In Jin’s 1,142 language sample it occurred in 128 languages,
       on all continents, and in 63 genera. […] Out of the 45 languages for which both
       research papers and reference grammars were consulted, expletive negation was
       mentioned in research papers but not grammars in 27 languages, suggesting that
       expletive negation most likely occurs in many more languages in Jin’s sample:
       expletive negation is a relatively widespread phenomenon and certainly not an
       oddity of Romance languages.


Furthermore, Jin & Koenig’s survey of 722 languages reports (2021: 40) that 74
languages show examples of EN. Their list of EN triggers goes beyond the traditional
list considered in the present paper and considers not only temporal operators (see
(10)-(12) below) or verbs such as ‘regret’, ‘fear’ etc. (see (49)-(53) below), but also
logical operator triggers such as ‘impossible’, ‘unless’, ‘without’. As can be seen in the
references below, some valuable monographs have been recently dedicated to this
topic (see fn. 2).
     However, even languages that have EN can do without it (see (4) and the Italian
translation of (8)). Significantly, van der Auwera (2009) is right in considering EN a
universal potentiality. He collects examples where present-day French ne, ne pas and
pas can all be considered as expletive; as pas has inherent negative meaning in all
contexts and registers, independently of the presence of ne (cf. Mosegaard Hansen &
Visconti 2012: 454f.), it can be expletive, i.e., pleonastic, in non-standard sentences
such as ex. (1a), instead of the standard (1b):


(1)    French (Indo-European)


a.     J’imagine que je désire      plus que j’peux     pas obtenir
       I imagine that I desire more than I can          NEG      obtain
       ‘I imagine that I want more than I can obtain.’
b.     J’imagine que je désire plus que je ne peux obtenir.




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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


Here are some examples where EN appears in utterances having different values:
comparative, as in (1), (2) and (4), fear verbs in (3) and (5), and temporal in (6) and
(7). By no means is this list exhaustive.3
     From the following examples (2)-(7), we see that EN is a NEG that does not have the
function of expressing negative polarity (see, among others, Dobrushina 2021: 121):


(2)      French (Indo-European)
         Il     est        plus grand       que vous ne        pensez.
         He     is         bigger           than you NEG think
         ‘He’s bigger than you think.’


(3)      French (Indo-European)
         J’ai         peur qu’      il ne       pleuve demain
         I have fear that it NEG rains                   tomorrow
         ‘I am afraid that it will rain tomorrow.’4


(4)      Italian (Indo-European)
         Maria        ha     mangiato più          biscotti    che (non)       Piero.
         Maria has eaten                    more cookies       than (NEG)      Piero
         ‘Mary has eaten more cookies than Peter.’


(5)      Russian (Indo-European)
         Boj-u-š,               čto         syn ne       zabole-l
         Fear-1SG-RFL           COMPL       son NEG fall.ill-PST
         ‘I am afraid that my son might get ill.’



3
    For a general survey on EN across the languages of the world, see Jin & Koenig (2021) with reference
to the previous literature.
4
    As can be seen in the examples reported in footnote 2, the question of mood associated with           EN   in
the complement clause is very intricate, especially in the Romance languages; however, it does not
impact the very nature of           EN.   On the usage of indicative vs. subjunctive in the Italian historical
tradition, see Nocentini 2003. As Jin & Koenig (2021: 71) have noted, only a subset of             EN   triggers
selects the subjunctive mood, and the subjunctive can be optional. Moreover, the nature of the verb
(accomplishment / resultative / event, state, etc.) plays a role in the choice of the verbal mood. In the
following, I shall not deal with the moods that appear in the examples, except for a short discussion in
Section 5.


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Ramat                                                          Expletive negation and related problems


(6)   Neo-Aramaic (Afro-Asiatic; Khan 2016: 499)
      ʾé-+dān     léla           +
                                     vàra,      |ɟə̀xcəla.|
      that-time NEG.COP.3FSG enter.PROG         laugh.PROG.3FSG
      ‘Just as she enters, she laughs.’


(7)   Danish (Indo-European)
      Ikke så snart      Amsterdam- traktaten         trådte      i     kraft,
      not as soon        Amsterdam treaty-the         came        into force,
      begyndte    Europa-Kommissionen …
      began       EU-Commission
      ‘No sooner had the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force than the European
      Commission began…’


Helmut Haberland (LINGTYP, 12 Jan. 2022) comments (7) as follows:


      One could translate this [scil. Ikke så snart] into English with ‘no sooner’ and one
      might ask if a difference between “no sooner” (with negation) and ‘as soon as’
      (without negation) always is observed by all speakers, as subtle it may be.


When speaking of translation, it is relevant to note that EN can be used in a target
language, whereas it is not present in the source language, as in the famous
Shakespearean verse quoted in the exergon and repeated here as (8):


(8)
a. English (Indo-European)
  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
  Philosophy.
b. Italian (Indo-European)
  Ci sono più cose in cielo e in terra, Orazio, che non ne sogni la tua scienza.


In English it would be impossible to say than aren’t dreamt.
  To note that the EN is not obligatory in the Italian translation: …che ne sogni la tua
filosofia would be quite correct as well. Interestingly, Old Church Slavonic knew the
same optionality of the negative particle ne, whereas later, in the 15th-17th centuries,
the presence of ne with preverbal N-words became the preferred variant. Finally, the



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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


ne accompanying N-words became almost obligatory from the 17th century on:
Russian is nowadays a strict NegConc language (see Garzonio 2019, Section 5, with
the corresponding diachronic examples).
   This hint regarding the historical development and the uncertainty of the speaker
about the presence / absence of NEG is very relevant. Generally speaking, we agree
with Delfitto et al. (2019: 86) conclusion that EN has to be considered in the context
of the speaker’s presuppositions and implicatures (we will come back to this also in
the following sections). A more detailed and restrictive definition of EN, intended to
eliminate phenomena that, strictly speaking, do not belong to the EN domain, such as
rhetorical questions, concessives, polite requests, etc., is offered by Jin & Koenig
(2021: 41):


      The occurrence of a negator is an instance of expletive negation if (i) it is included
      in a syntactic dependent of a lexical item (verb, adposition, adverb, or
      collocation), (ii) it is triggered by the meaning of that lexical item, but (iii) it does
      not contribute a (logical) negation to the proposition that the syntactic dependent
      denotes.


The French, Italian, and Russian examples above do fit the three conditions: J’ai peur
qu’ il ne pleuve demain is fine, but *Je souhaite qu’il ne pleuve demain, intended as ‘I
wish that it will rain tomorrow’, does not work because of condition (ii). The real
negative sentence for ‘I wish that tomorrow it will not rain’ would be Je souhaite qu’il
ne pleuve pas demain: with fear verbs as avoir peur EN entails the omission of pas (or,
more precisely, the omission of pas marks ne as EN).
   As we have just seen in (3) and (5), complement clauses of verbs of fear often
contain an EN. I shall come back to this topic later. There are different contexts that
invite EN. Though Jin & Koenig (2021) do not include exclamatives in ENs, it is worth
paying attention to sentences like (9). Greco (2019, § 2.1) notes that EN rejects ‘strong’
Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as affatto ‘not at all’:


(9)   Italian (Indo-European)
      Che cosa     non ha        (*affatto)      capito        Gianni!
      what         not has (*not at all) understood             John!
      ‘What has John understood!’ (= John understood everything!).




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Ramat                                                   Expletive negation and related problems


The non in (9) has an emphasizing effect, and the sentence without non (i.e. che cosa
ha capito Gianni!) could even mean that Gianni has totally misunderstood what has
been previously talked about (on the exclamative non, cf. Parry 2013: 99. Delfitto et
al. 2019: 66ff. speak of (9) as capturing “the universal flavor of wh-exclamatives
featuring EN”). The distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ NPIs (see below, fn. 13)
does not impact the very nature of EN, which is a unitary phenomenon. Moreover, the
intrinsic semantics of the verb can or cannot favour an EN construction, as in the case
of souhaiter, or Russian starat’sja ‘to try’. Consequently, the decision to consider the
presence / absence of NEG in a sentence is not a black or white question to be solved
simply on the basis of syntactic criteria: the context implicatures play a decisive role
in interpreting EN sentences.
  Another aspect of the multifarious EN has been alluded to by Ludwig Paul
(LINGTYP 12 Jan.2022) with the German sentence:


(10) German (Indo-European)
     Bevor    ich   das Geld     nicht     gespart    habe,   kann       ich   mir        kein
     before I       the money NEG          saved      have    can        I     to.me      no
     Auto kaufen.
     car    buy
     ‘Before I have saved money, I can’t buy a car for myself.’


This nicht is superfluous from a logical point of view, since the negative indefinite
pronoun kein in the main clause already assures the global negative sense of the
sentence, but in this context nicht has a hybrid temporal / conditional nature: ‘Before
/ If I do not save money enough, I can’t buy a car’. Hence, its possibility in the spoken
language to extend the value of EN to different domains.
  Among the EN constructions, Wälchli (2018: 149) introduces what he calls the
‘opportunity.before’ type, used for taking advantage of an opportunity which will not
be possible anymore at some later point in time. He quotes the following Russian
sentence from Iordanskaja & Mel’čuk (2009):


(11) Russian (Indo-European)
     Poka                        (ja) ne     zabyl,              sxodi               za
     as.long.as/until/before     (I)     not forget:PST.MSG      go.after:IPFV       behind




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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


         xlebom!
         bread:INS.SG
         ‘Before I forget: go buy some bread.’5


Japanese has the same construction (see Kuno 1973: 155 also cited in Wälchli 2018:
150):


(12) Japanese (Japonic)
         Wasure-nai uti            ni     henzi     o      kakimasyoo
         forget-NEG      inside to        answer ACC let’s.write
         ‘I will write an answer before I forget it.’6


In conclusion, we have seen thus far in examples (1)-(7) different usages of EN in
different contexts (by no means all the possible contexts we can find in languages).
     The following sections will briefly discuss some negative constructs that are dealt
with in the literature and examine the relations of EN with these constructs to find a
unifying ratio, the ‘red thread’ I allude to in the introduction.


3. Negative Concord and Embracing Construction


As is well-known, the term NegConc refers to the phenomenon according to which a
negative element (a so-called ‘N-word’, or ‘Negative Concord Item’, NCI) occurs in a
sentence with a negative marker ‘no(t)’. The negative component is expressed twice
or more, if more than one N-word is present, but the sentence is interpreted as being
negated only once.7
     Romance languages have NegConc as almost obligatory. For instance, in Rumanian
a sentence such as:



5
    *before I don’t forget would be impossible, but avant que je n’oublie (pas) would be fine.
6
    In French we might have avant que je n’oublie pas.
7
    There exists a vast literature on NegConc. For recent reports on the state of the art, see van der
Auwera & Van Alsenoy (2016), Giannakidou & Zeijlstra (2017), and Breitbarth et al. (2020). For a
wider, philosophical approach, see Kuhn (2022). Moser (2019) gives an exhaustive overview of
NegConc in the German dialects, with a focus on Upper German. As for the cognitive and processing
operations tied to NegConc, with particular attention to its acquisition by children, see Tagliani et al.
(2022), with a useful summary of the previous literature.


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Ramat                                                  Expletive negation and related problems


(13) Rumanian (Indo-European)
     *Niciun     student   a     citit cartea
        No       student   has read book.the
        ‘No student has read the book.’


is not accepted. You have to insert the negator nu and say, instead


(14) Rumanian (Indo-European; see Moscati, forthcom.)
     Niciun student nu a citit cartea
     ‘No student has read the book.’


In a sense, Rum. nu in (14) is logically superfluous since niciun already gives the
sentence a negative meaning, as Germ. kein in (10). This fact shows the (diachronic)
ties between NegConc and EN, the difference being that Rum. nu belongs now to
NegConc as a grammaticalized element, while EN is ‘per se’ optional (on the discussion
of the logic of NegConc, see below in this section).
  The tendency to accompany negative quantifiers (often an indefinite PRO) by a
predicate negator is widespread (see examples below). For instance, Russian shows
NegConc in


(15) Russian (Indo-European)
     Nikto       ničego    ne    skazal.
     nobody      nothing   not said
     ‘Nobody said anything.’


which corresponds to Italian (with triple NEG as in Russian)


(16) Italian (Indo-European)
     Nessuno non disse niente
     nobody      not said nothing
     ‘Nobody said anything.’


However, (17) sounds rather emphatic, with the more standard form being




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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


(17) Italian (Indo-European)
      Nessuno disse niente
      ‘Nobody said nothing.’


In Russian a sentence without NegConc (18a) is ungrammatical; the correct form is
instead (18b):


(18) Russian (Indo-European)


a.    *Nikto       zdes’ menja      znaiet:
      nobody       here me          knows.
b.    Nikto        zdes’ menja      ne     znaiet
      nobody       here me          not knows
      ‘Nobody knows me here.’


NegConc appears also in dependent clauses:


(19) Portuguese (Indo-European; Pessoa, Tabacaria).
      Como       não fiz     propósito nenhum, talvez                tudo            fosse
      since      not I.did purpose         not.any       perhaps     everything      would be
      nada.
      nothing
      ‘Since I acted out no purpose, perhaps then everything was nothing.’


German is a language that does not have NegConc, and a possible translation of (19)
would be, with two coordinated sentences:


(20) German (Indo-European)
      Allerdings hatte ich       mir       nichts        vorgenommen,       und so     war
      however had I              to.me     nothing       proposed,          and thus was
      dies alles vielleicht      nichts
      this all     perhaps       nothing


Logicians have maintained that the meaning of (15) should be ‘Everyone said
something’ and that there is a form-meaning mismatch. Hence, the consideration of



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Ramat                                                               Expletive negation and related problems


NEG    in (15) and (16) as ‘vacuous’, ‘pleonastic’, i.e. ‘expletive’. However, it is a fact
that (16) and (17) are both usually meant as negative, and all NEG elements contribute
to the negative (emphatic) sense of the sentence with a NegConc strategy.8
     One hundred years ago, Jespersen noted that in Old English it was the regular
idiom to say: nan man nyste nan þing, ‘no man not-knew nothing’ (Jespersen 1922:
352). This construction still survives in non-standard English; Jespersen quotes from
George Eliot: there was niver nobody else, […] gen (‘given’) me nothin’ (see ‘Negative
Concord’ in Glottopedia). The construct where negative indefinite pronouns such as
nobody, Rus. nikto, Span. nadie etc. co-occur with another indefinite negative (e.g.,
nothing, Rus. ničego, Span. nada., etc., and also never, Rus. nikogda, Span. nunca, etc.)


8
    Exceptions such as the colloquial French type C’est pas rien ‘It is not nothing’ (=‘It is quite
something’), where two NEG words give a positive meaning, are rare. See de Swart (2010: 252). In the
present case, the indefinite negative rien is in the scope of pas, and consequently the two negatives
produce a positive outcome according to the mentioned principle of logic that such a statement
is equivalent to the denial of the second negative rien, as in


i. it is not the case that John is not here which means ‘John is here’.


See the classical example of Lat. nemo non (Gianollo 2018: 145; Moscati, forthcom. § 4.1):


ii. aperte    enim adulantem          nemo            non    videt (Cic., Lael.,99)
     blatantly in.fact flattering:ACC no.one:NOM      not    see:3SG
     ‘no one does not recognize someone who is blatantly flattering.’ (i.e., everyone recognizes
     someone who…)
iii. Nemo        ergo   non   miser      Prorsus nemo (Cic., Tusc. 1.9)
     nobody      then not     unhappy.
     ‘No one then is not unhappy. Absolutely nobody.’, i.e. ‘Everyone is unhappy’


Remember that Classical Latin is basically not a NegConc language but a ‘double NEG language’, where
two negations lead to a positive statement: each additional negative element / operator contributes to
the meaning of the sentence. As stated by Gianollo (2019: 245), in ‘double negation languages’ (like
German, English, Latin, and also Homeric Greek, Gianollo 2021) two negative indefinites do not
produce a NegConc but represent two effective negations whose sum results in a positive sense:


iv. German (Indo-European)
     Hans gab    keinem    Teilnehmer    nichts
     Hans gave to.none participant nothing
     ‘Hans gave something to every participant.’




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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


is largely diffused in languages around the world, particularly in non-standard or non-
standardized varieties (see de Swart 2010; Moser 2019). Old Italian knew NegConc:
[…] e comandò a’ baroni che nessuno non li insegnasse spendere questo oro (Novellino, 7,
33.10-11) ‘…and he ordered the barons that nobody should instruct them how to
spend this gold’. Van der Auwera and Neuckermans (2004: 462) quote the following
examples from the Flemish dialects:


(21) Flemish (Indo-European)
         ‘k ben niemand ni            tegengekomen
         I am     nobody       NEG    met
         ‘I have not met anyone.’


with ni as NEG, along with the standard Dutch strategy, that is, without NegConc:


(22) Dutch (Indo-European)
         ‘k ben niemand tegengekomen
         I am     nobody       met
         ‘I have not met anyone.’9


Indefinite pronouns are usually ¬, when used as elements of the so-called ‘non-
canonical NEG’, i.e., in negation strategies that are pragmatically marked (see
Schwenter 2006; cf. Ballarè 2019: 211).10
Therefore, in English we have both


(23) Nobody has said anything


as well as


(24) Nobody has said nothing

9
    See also the ten case studies presented in Willis et al. (2013), with the interaction between   NEG   and
indefinites that raise NegConc.
10
     On the Romance indefinite ‘N-forms’ in NegConc, as in It. Non ho visto nessun bambino ‘I haven’t see
any child’, Span. No tengo ningún comentario oficial sobre eso ‘I don’t have any official comment on it’,
Port. Não vou assistir a nenhum espetáculo hoje à noite. ‘This night I’m not going to see any show’, etc.,
see, among others, Gianollo (2018).




                                                                                                          13
Ramat                                                  Expletive negation and related problems


and both have the same first-order logic representation (see de Swart 2010: 248):


(25) ¬Ǝx¬Ǝy Say (x,y)


As an anonymous reviewer has noted, (25) contains two negative operators, that is,
it describes the double negation reading found in the standard language. However,
(24) is actually used in spoken language as being equivalent to (23). Accordingly, it
has to be taken as a non-standard NegConc structure. Such a meaning equivalence
shows the optionality and the speaker’s possible uncertainty between NegConc and
double NEG: any is not a NEG-expression per se, cf. (26).


(26) Is there anything I can do to help?


The optionality and uncertainty between NegConc and double NEG reading in certain
environments – as is the case in Russian for holophrastic answers to negative
questions (Garzonio 2019: 177) – is very important from the diachronic point of view
since, as we will see below, it can give a hint in explaining the presence of EN.
  However, first we must have a look at the so-called ‘embracing (or discontinuous)
negation’, such as in Catalan Joan no menja pas peix, or French Jean ne mange pas de
poisson, ‘John does not eat fish’ (see Bernini & Ramat 1996: 44;49). As the following
examples (29)-(35) show, embracing negation, with its two negative items, may lead
to understanding why one negative element may become superfluous and hence an
EN.

  Embracing constructions as well as NegConc have double negative lexemes, and
both are interpreted as having just one negative meaning. Note that the second
negative element of the embracing NEG and NegConc is usually located in the focus
position, which in short sentences such as (27) and (28) coincides with the end of the
sentence. Zanuttini (1997), and subsequently Poletto (2008), have collected a large
sample of this kind in Italian dialects, with the indefinite PRO closing the sentence in
focus position like the NPIs:


(27) Emilian dialect (Indo-European)
      E’    n     m’   a    vest entsun
      SCL   NEG   me   has seen nobody
      ‘Nobody saw me.’



                                                                                           14
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


(28) Piedmontese (Indo-European)
         A          parla        nen cun gnun
         he         speaks not with nobody
         ‘He does not speak with anybody.’


Such a trend in underlining the negativity of the sentence at its very end is
psychologically and cognitively on a par with the historical development of the
embracing NEG-type, as in Fr. ne…pas or in Malt. ma….-x:11


(29) Maltese (Afro-Asiatic)
         Marika ma               rat-x          lit-tifel
         Marika NEG saw-NEG                     the-boy
         ‘M. did not see the boy.’


11
     The Malt suffixes –x, Arab. –š derive from šayʔ ‘thing’ (cf. Fr. rien < Lat. rem-ACC ‘thing’). Thus,
originally they were            NPIs;   see Bernini & Ramat 1996: 235, fn.54. Later, they became obligatory parts
of the     NEG     construction, i.e., they grammaticalized, according to the so-called Jespersen’s cycle. I do
not think it necessary to explain once more the well-known ‘Jespersen’s Cycle’ with its evolution
illustrated by the classical French example: 1. Ne+VB à 2. Ne+VB+pas à                        VB+pas.   It is enough to
note that Ahern’s Dissertation (2015), by using mathematical and statistical methods, has
reconstructed the same evolution from Middle English to Modern English: from pre-verbal ne to an
initially emphatic embracing ne...not; from embracing ne...not to post-verbal not. As for the French
cycle, it must be remembered that French-based creoles use                    NEG+VB   (= back to stage 1 of the cycle
and hence ready to start a new cycle!): mo pa kup lit. ‘I NEG cut’, i.e. ‘I don’t cut’ (Louisiana); nu pa vle
lit. ‘we     NEG     want’, i.e. ‘We don’t want’ (Guadeloupe), along with the more French type that has
postverbal         NEG:   mo kup pa; nu vle pa (see Posner 1985: 180-83; Ramat 2006; for a critical assessment
of Jespersen’s cycle, see Larrivée 2011). Preverbal nu is found also in the Spanish-based creole of
Palenque (see further below):


i. Palenquero (Indo-European creole; Schwegler 1991a: 173, from Friedemann & Patiño Rosselli
1983)
     Pero kumu nu ta                         yobé ¡uu!, sé              mori toito
     pero como no TENSE/ASP                  llover uu      TENSE/ASP   morir todito
     but      if          not                rain   uu                  die     everything
     ‘But since it doesn’t rain, uuh! everything dies.’


Note that the term ‘negative polarity item’ used by Booij & Bettelou & Rem (2006) has nothing to do
with the      NPIs    alluded to in this footnote. Ghe- is a prefix that in Middle Nederland transforms the
following verb (mostly kunnen) into a negative polarity item.


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Ramat                                                              Expletive negation and related problems


Both pas and the suffix –x are (or were) negative polarity items whose function was
originally to enhance, as postverbal minimizer objects, the negative sense of the
sentence. And both can be subsumed under the label of ‘multiple negation’, which
intensifies the negation, such as the double NEG and the NegConc.
      On the other hand, Siller-Runggaldier (1985) has studied the Central Ladin (near
the Austrian-Italian border) negation in sentences like


(30) Central Ladin (Indo-European)


a.       Livinallongo and Fassano
         La no 'vεŋ ('nɔ)
b.       Gardenese
         La ne 'veŋ ('nò)
c.       Badiotto
         Ara ne vegn (no)
         ‘She’s not coming (at all).’


She has observed (1985: 74) that the second no is always sentence-final (= …. NEG#)
and does not refer to any particular element of the sentence, but resumes the negative
value of the entire sentence. Further examples from Northern Italian dialects can be
found in Poletto (2008; see, e.g., her ex. 32: No ghe so ndà no, lit. Not there I.am gone
not, i.e. ‘I didn’t go there’ with the second no in focus position).
      Similarly, in Afrikaans, a V2 language like Dutch and German, every negative
sentence must end with the NEG nie (or another negative morpheme):12


(31) Afrikaans (Indo-European)
         Jan het      nie geëet       nie
         J.    has not eaten          not
         ‘John has not eaten.’


versus Dutch Jan heft niet gegeten.


12
     According to Bernini (1994, § 4.2) the Afrikaans negative construction is a calque from the colonial
Portuguese, once again a non-cultivated language variety. Bernini reports Valkhoff’s (1972: 94)
distinction between ‘High’ and ‘Low Portuguese’: “a pidginized, creolized or simplified Portuguese”
used in South Africa. (On Brazilian Portuguese, see immediately below.)


                                                                                                       16
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


   If a negative sentence has a subordinated clause, the NEG nie is repeated at the end
of the subordinated clause and refers to the main sentence, according to the general
rule of nie in final position.


(32) Afrikaans (Indo-European; Bernini 1994, ex. 13)
      Jan het       nie gedink [dat iets                   met hom sou    gebeur]   nie
      J.     has NEG thought [that something               with him would happen]   NEG

      ‘John didn’t think that something could happen to him.’


In (Brazilian) Portuguese, the NEG não is frequently repeated at the end of the sentence
and the same holds for the creoles of Palenque (Colombia) and Chocó-Spanish
(Northwestern Colombia; see Schwegler 1990: 170):


(33) Brazilian Portuguese (Indo-European)
      Ele    não         fala    português       não
      he     NEG1        speaks Portuguese       NEG1

      ‘He does not speak P.’


(34) Palenquero (Indo-European creole)
      I nu          ta                  kandá nu
      I NEG1        TENSE/ASPECT        sing     NEG1

      ‘I’m not singing (at all).’


(35) Chocó-Spanish (Indo-European)
      Yo     no          sé      no
      I      NEG1        know    NEG1
      ‘I do not know.’


The Afrikaans ex. (32) follows exactly the same scheme (hence, the calque hypothesis
referred to in fn. 12): ‘NEG1…NEG1#’ is valid also when a subordinate clause is
inserted:


(36) Brazilian Portuguese (Indo-European)
      Ele    não         sabe    que o         pai       chegou não
      he     NEG1        knows that the father arrived NEG1#
      ‘He does not know that his father arrived.’


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Ramat                                                                Expletive negation and related problems


where the final NEG1# refers to the main sentence ‘He doesn’t know’ and not to the
subordinate clause (see Schwegler 1991a: 199). Schwegler (ibid.) has shown that
there may be constructions with double NEG as in (33) or final NEG only as in


(37) Palenquero (Indo-European creole; Schwegler 1991b: 172)
         E     kelé     fruta nu
         he    want     fruit not
         ‘He doesn’t want any fruit.’


There are other examples of sentence-final NEG with the Scheme NEG1+VB+NEG1#,
which is rather widespread among the languages of the world (cf. Bernini 1994 for
the African languages; Ramat 2006).13
      In examples (33)-(36), the second NEG is the repetition of the first one
(NEG1...NEG1(#)), and therefore its history is different from that of NPIs such as pas or
goutte, mica, etc., which originally represented the (emphatically minimizing) object
of the sentence (NEG1…NEG2(#)): non bibo guttam ‘I don’t drink a drop’, used in
ancient French as NEG2 (see Jeu d’Adam,12th cent.: Par Dieu , je n’ai goute d’argent ‘By
God, I don’t have a penny’); non vado passum ‘I don’t move a step’. As is well-known,
(parts of these) NPIs were finally grammaticalized as a NEG marker: Je ne vais pas, je
ne vois pas (see fn. 11)14.
      According to the Optimality Theory, there is a contrast between the overall
tendency to place the verb in the scope position of NEG (i.e., to have preverbal NEG)

13
     A good history of the French negation, endowed with fine examples, can be read in Grieve-Smith’s
Dissertation (2009). From the acquisition point of view, we may refer to Tagliani (2019; reported by
Tagliani et al. 2022: 116): “double negation, which is extremely marked from both a pragmatic,
prosodic and syntactic perspective, is learned by children only at a much later age, at around 7, when
they start to correctly interpret and produce these marked constructions”. As for the creoles, among
whom the already-mentioned Palenquero, see the accurate description in Bernini (1994, Section 3.2).
Note that the second    NEG   does not necessarily coincide with the first one. In the Portuguese-based
creole of Sāo Tomé, for instance, we find na (=NEG1)...fa (=         NEG2)    and in angular (São Tomé and
Príncipe) na (=NEG1)….. wa (=NEG2). It has been suggested that fa and wa derive from the aboriginal
languages of West Africa. But the problem is too complex and too far from the topic of the present
paper. The main point remains that creoles do have embracing NEG.
14
     Greco’s (2019) twofold distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’         NPIs,   based almost exclusively on
syntactic properties, does not help very much in defining what       NPIs   properly are: It. alzare un dito ‘to
lift a finger’ or avere la più pallida idea ‘to have the faintest idea’ are considered as ‘weak-NPI’. But this
makes the concept of ‘NPI’ very vague and potentially unlimited. For a more exhaustive definition, see
Bernini & Ramat (1996: 30-34).


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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


and to place the postverbal NEG in the focus position15. This contrast has caused the
emergence of discontinuous NEG (= NEG…. NEG; cf. de Swart 2010: 247), both via the
repetition of NEG1 or the grammaticalization of NPIs.
     However, what we finally get in both cases is an embracing NEG, which is really
not necessary for the negative sense of the sentence, so that one negative element can
disappear: Je vois pas ‘I don’t see’. If both NEGs are maintained, this may open one of
the ways leading to EN.
     The repetition of NEG1 in the sentence-final position represents an afterthought
strategy, the aim of which is (or was, before its grammaticalization) to enhance the
negative force of the entire utterance, as in:


(38) French (Indo-European)
         Je (ne) sais pas moi, non.
         ‘I don’t know, nah.’16


These no, non, nah, etc. may be considered as a kind of comment on the previous
utterance; we have already seen that NEG reinforcement, both via negative PROS (i.e.,
NegConc) or quantifiers and via NPIs, appears frequently in non-standard varieties.17
     This fact can easily be considered as the speaker’s intention to underline the
negative content of her/his utterance when s/he speaks in an informal, spontaneous
but pragmatically efficient way (‘emphatic negation’). And this strategy is not limited
to the spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Even modern literary texts make current
use of this strategy: Bernini (1994) quotes an example from Jorge Amado:


(39) Brazilian Portuguese (Indo-European)
         “Quem vem         lá?” – disse Ferreira.        “É   homem. Nāo é bicho               nāo”
         who      comes there? - said Ferreira. is            man.     Not is animal not
         ‘Who’s coming?’ –said F. ‘It is a man, not an animal.’


15
     On the focus properties of comparison (a topic we shall come back to in a moment) see Gawron
1995.
16
     Jespersen (1917: 72) had already spoken for the Port. construction não   VB   não of “incorporation of
a post-sentential, afterthought like ‘resumptive negation’”; see further, Schwegler (1990: 170) and
(1991a); Ramat (2006).
17
     See further examples in Google s.v. Negative Concord, with reference to the Yale Grammatical
Diversity Project, which offers many instances from non-standard varieties of American English, as
I don't never have no problems ‘I don't ever have any problems’ (African American English).


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Ramat                                                              Expletive negation and related problems


To sum up what we have said thus far: whatever the origin of the doubling negative
element – i.e., via the repetition of NEG1 as in Port. nāo, or via NPIs as in Fr. pas – the
final step in the construction is more or less the obligatory grammaticalization of
postverbal or sentence final NEG (i.e., ‘...NEG#’), as we have seen in the Afrikaans ex.
(31); see also Ek het dit nie gesien nie lit. I have this not seen not, ‘I don’t have seen
this’. This entails, particularly for the NPIs, the well-known progressive bleaching of
their original meaning. However, this holds also for the repetition of ‘NEG1#’ as in
Braz. Port. nāo… nāo. Moreover, the final NEG, which can have a holophrastic value,
particularly in answers18, has finally become a simple marker of NEG. In other words,
‘…NEG#’ is the final grammaticalized and no longer emphatic step in the ‘NEG….NEG#’
emphatic construction: cf. Dutch


(40) Dutch (Indo-European)
         Die man verstáán                          die   werk      eenvoudig       nie!
         that man understand:PRS.3SG               the work        simply          not!
         ‘That man simply does not understand the work!’


4. Negative comparison


Some of the constructions that express (negative) comparison belong to the same
psychological strategy as illustrated in the previous section (see examples (26)-(29)),
though the outcome is not a double NEG. Stassen (1985: 218), based on a sample of
110 languages, says there exists an “intimate relationship of the comparative
construction with negation” in a large part of his language sample and that the
comparison may include a negative pronoun.19 Holthausen (1913), in a short note
entitled ‘Negation statt Vergleichungspartikel beim Komparativ’, had already
observed that comparisons such as



18
     On the holophrastic negative forms, see Floricic (2016). Already present in Old French: Nel feras? –
Non! (Jeu d’Adam, 171) ‘Won’t you do it? – No’, and continued in today’s spoken French: T’as rien vu
hier soir? - Rien ‘Did you see anything yesterday evening? - Nothing’.
19
     In her PhD thesis, Ballarè quotes (2019: 34) the following sentence twitted by the famous goalkeeper
Gigi Buffon for the footballer Paulo Dybala upon his winning the ‘Gazzetta dello Sport’ Award: Meriti
questo premio più di nessun altro @gianluigibuffon !!!. lit. You deserve such a prize more than nobody
else, i.e., ‘Nobody would deserve such a prize more than you!’


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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


(41) Middle English (Leg.Schott. III1103, anno 1400)
       Sonare na onyman cuth thynke
       ‘eher als jemand denken konnte’
       ‘sooner than anybody could [*not!] think.’


have an implicitly negative sense, which explains the presence of na. Holthausen
refers to a previous article by Fraenkel (1911) that mentions the same construction
in Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, the Slavonic languages, and Lithuanian. Holthausen
quotes further English dialectal comparative forms using nor (< OEngl. náwðer < ná-
hwæðer < I.-E. NE-KWO-TERO- with the negative element ne followed by the typical I.-
E comparative suffix –tero-):


(42) He’s older nor I/me


by Holthausen literally translated as ‘er ist älter, und nicht ich’ meaning ‘he’s older
than me’.
     In Modern English, nor is a conjunction used before the second or last in a set of
negative possibilities: its etymologically negative comparative meaning has been
preserved. Similarly, Klein (1980) considers EN as arising from an underlying
negation. But NEG can even surface in negative comparisons, as we have seen in (42).
Some languages have grammaticalized the negative strategy: “(a BIG) & (b not-BIG)”
meaning ‘a is bigger than b’. See Classic Nahuatl (examples from Stolz & Stolz 2001:
39; cf. Andrews 1975: 350ff.):


(43) Classic Nahuatl (Aztecan)


a.     Oc    achi      ni-yec-tli              in    amo        tehua-tl
       still some      1SG-beautiful-ABS DET NEG                2SG-ABS
       ‘I am more beautiful than you.’ (lit. I’m beautiful, you not)
b.     Tlapanahuia ic        tliltic   in     cacalo-tl    in     amo huexolo-tl
       surpass         with black      DET    raven-ABS DET NEG peacock-ABS
       ‘The raven is blacker than the peacock.’ (lit. the raven surpass with blackness
       not the peacock).




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Ramat                                                                     Expletive negation and related problems


Twenty languages in Stassen’s sample (110 languages) adopt this strategy (called by
Stassen 1985: 44ff. ‘conjoined comparative [with] a positive-negative polarity’):


(44) Hixkaryána (Cariban)
          kaw-ohra naha Waraka,                 kaw naha Kaywerye
          tall-not       he:is W.               tall he:is K.
          ‘K. is taller than W.’


(45) Telugu (Dravidian)
          I- pandu       a-pandu-kanna                          tipi-ga   undi
          this-fruit that-fruit-not.be:PRS.PTCP sweet-this is
          ‘This fruit is sweeter than that one.’ (Stassen 1985: 310)20


Consider now the French sentence


(46) French (Indo-European)
          Je suis parti avant qu’il ne soit arrivé
           ‘I left before he arrived.’


As we have already seen in examples (10) and (11), avant (‘before’) establishes a
temporal comparison between two states of affairs (A before B), and the sentence
refers in its second part to a non-real state of affairs: at the moment of my departure
he was not yet arrived: “il s’agit toujours d’une comparaison établie […] entre deux
événements dont l’un n’existait pas encore quand l’autre s’est produit” (‘we have to
do with a comparison between two events, and the second one did not yet exist when
the first happened’, Vendryes 1950: 5; cf. Delfitto 2020, referring to Krifka 2010: “For
every time t preceding A, ¬B(t)”). Forest (1993: 115) quotes Welsh and Berber
parallels. 21


20
     On the contrary, the non-comparative negative sentence has
(i) I-pandu          tipi-di         ka-du
     this-fruit      sweet-this      not-is     (Stassen 1985: 51)
21
     See also Lithuanian (Indo-European; Wälchli 2018:194)
(i) [Šlovės Dievas apsireiškė mūsų tėvui Abraomui Mesopotamijoje,]
     kai     jis dar           nebuvo              persikėlęs                    į      Charaną,
     as      he yet            NEG.be:PST.3SG      move:RFL.PST.PA.NOM.SG.M      into   Haran


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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


       As Vendryes states, (47a) sharply contrasts with (47b):


(47) French (Indo-European)


a.        il a bien changé depuis qu’il a été malade
          ‘he has really changed since he has been ill.’
b.        *depuis qu’il n’ait eté malade
          ‘after he was not ill.’


(47b) is impossible, since it is a fact that he’s been ill.
       As we will see below in Sections 5 and 6, what might appear as a series of
uncorrelated observations can be reduced to a common denominator: namely, the
presence of negative elements: via Negative Polarity Items in embracing negation (as
in Fr. il ne mange pas), in Negative Concord (as in (14): Niciun student nu a citit cartea),
in the Expletive Negation (as in (46): Je suis parti avant qu’il ne soit arrive), and in
Negative Comparison (as in (41): sonare na ony man cuth thynke).
       An anonymous reviewer has noted that there is a difference between NegConc and
embracing negation on one side and comparatives on the other since the latter do not
seem to have a pragmatic need for enhancement nor to have a negative meaning. This

       ‘[The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was in Mesopotamia,] before he
       settled in Haran.’


Old Church Slavonic uses ‘before’ also in negative hortatives that refer to two actions where one has
to occur before the other, exactly as in the French avant example (43):
(ii)      Sъnidi             prěžde    daže         ne     oumьretъ            otročę   moe
          descend:IMP.2SG    before    HORT.SUB     NEG    die:(PFV)PRS.3SG.   son      my
          ‘…come down before my child dies!’ (Wälchli, ibid.)


Cf. Old Italian (Bono Giamboni, Libro, Chap. 11, para 28):
(iii)     …e da te non si partiranno giammai (…) infino che non t’hanno data la vittoria
          ‘ …and from you they will never separate until/before they will [*not] give you the victory.’


On the Italian before-clauses with EN of the type
(iv)      Avvertila prima che non succeda qualche guaio!
          ‘Warn her before some trouble does (*?not) happen!’


see the discussion in Delfitto et al. (2019: 61ff.). See also Wälchli’s proposals in Section 6 below.




                                                                                                        23
Ramat                                                               Expletive negation and related problems


is correct as far as the pragmatic enhancement is concerned, but it does not change
the fact that we have seen lot of examples, drawn from very different languages,
where comparisons are or were expressed via a negative strategy (see, particularly,
(42)). Therefore, we are entitled to consider negative comparative constructs along
with other negative constructs, particularly when we find sentences containing
temporal comparison or sentences with fear verbs, which will be discussed below (cf.
examples (61) and (50), respectively).
      As we have said, one of the causes that triggers the insertion of a negative form or
the doubling of NEG is the pragmatic need to enhance the negative meaning of the
sentence. Jin & Koenig’s (2021; see Section 2) conclusion seems to be valid for all NEG
types considered in this paper: the presence of affirmative sentences p (John is heavier
than Dik) may lead speakers to produce ¬p (John is heavier than not Dik, scil. is):
Sanskrit mŗtamֹ śreyo ná jīvitam” lit. ‘death better not life’, i.e., ‘death is better than
life’, where the negative particle ná functions as a comparative particle (cf. Viti 2002:
71). In Italian we can have two possible translations: la morte è meglio che non la vita,
vs. la morte è meglio che la vita. In the first sentence non is clearly EN.
      Another interesting aspect of EN has to be considered. Kuteva (1998: 124ff.) cites
the following Bulgarian example of ‘action nearly averted’:


(48) Bulgarian (Indo-European)
         Bez / Za            malko ne         padnax
         without / for       few      NEG    fall1:SG.AOR
         ‘I almost fell.’


which corresponds exactly to Ital. “per poco non cadevo”, along with the equally
possible “per poco cadevo” (that implies …but I didn’t).
      Queffélec (1988: 422ff.) has a specific section on the facultative presence of EN vs.
Ø in Old French. See for instance, Mais moct crienment qu’ele leur faille ‘but they much
fear that she could fail them’ vs. Et por crienme que il n’i faillent / S’esvertuent de lor
poeirs ‘and fearing that they [*not] fail there, they strengthen their troops’, Benoît de
Sainte Maure Chronique, v. 34830 and 35814f., respectively.22


22
     However, utterances expressing the idea of ‘failing to’ do not necessarily belong to the domain of EN,
pace Queffélec (1988), who quotes Marie de Fance, Lais. Guigemar 735f.: Quant el l’oï, si suspira / Par
un petit ne se pasma ‘As she heard him, she sighed so strong / that she failed to faint’: actually, the
dame did not faint, and consequently the NEG is not superfluous.


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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


5. Negation with fear verbs


The above observations suggest some reflections on a particular kind of EN we have
already introduced in Section 2. In fact, EN concerns not only fear verbs but also verbs
such as ‘to think’, ‘to doubt’, ‘to be uncertain’, ‘to avoid’, etc. In other words when
used with these kinds of verbs, EN “is a means for the speakers not to commit to the
truth of what they are saying” Dobrushina (2021: 126, and cf. Grieve-Smith 2009:
166). Verbs like ‘think, fear, avoid’ etc., refer to a state of affairs which is possible but
not considered as real by the speaker. This is the reason EN mostly co-occurs with
non-indicative moods.
      Moreover, an intrinsically negative meaning of the verb can make NEG quite
superfluous. Jin & Koenig (2021: 56ff.) notice that many English speakers can say ‘I
miss not seeing you’ when they really mean ‘I miss seeing you’: “A speaker intends to
say p, but because the meaning of a trigger [as Fr. regretter ‘to regret’ or Engl. miss:
P.Rt.] strongly activates ¬p, ¬p is produced instead”.23
      As for the non-indicative moods used with fear verbs, notice that EN has been found
in Greek since Homeric times, with imperatives, interrogatives, conditionals,
optatives, called using the hypernym ‘nonveridical’ or ‘antiveridical’:


         A veridical operator entails the truth of p in all worlds in the model, while a
         nonveridical operator expresses uncertainty […] the class of nonveridical
         operators is the class of antiveridical ones, among which is negation; antiveridical
         operators entail the falsity of p. In other words, veridical operators reflect the
         speaker’s certainty and commitment to the truth of the proposition which is
         uttered, whereas nonveridical operators reflect uncertainty and lack of
         commitment, Chatzopoulou (2014, § 3.1), and see Dobrushina’s statement
         reported above.24



23
     Delfitto et al. (2019: 72) rightly quote Yoon (2011: 24), who states that EN triggers a likelihood scale
based on the speaker’s presuppositions of uncertainty or unlikelihood (see also the concept of ‘veridical’
discussed immediately below). In the present context, the threefold division of fear verbs introduced
by Dobrushina (2021) is not relevant. She also considers structures of fear verbs that do not show NEG.
On the contrary, the main topic of my paper is precisely the presence of           NEG   in sentences which
logically would not request the presence of NEG.
24
     As for the concept of ‘nonveridical’, Chatzopoulou refers, among others, to Giannakidou (1998).
Exceptions such as Japanese, Korean, and Russian using the indicative mood in fear-complements are
mentioned by Dobrushina (2021, § 3.1).


                                                                                                          25
Ramat                                                            Expletive negation and related problems


(49) Ancient Greek (Indo-European; Il.20, v.30)
        Δείδω μὴ         καὶ   τεῖχος ὑπὲρ       μόρον      ἐξαλαπάξῃ
        I.fear     NEG   and wall       against destiny     destroy:3SG.AOR.SBJ.
        ‘I am afraid that he will destroy the wall even against the destiny.’ 25


And in standard Modern Greek:


(50) Modern Greek (Indo-European; Chatzopoulou 2014).
        Ο        Γιάννης φοβάται        μην      αρρωστήσει.
        O        Jánis   fováte         min      arostísi
        the Janis        fear:IND.3SG NEG        get.sick:3SG.PRS.SBJ
        ‘John is afraid that he may get sick.’


The same situation occurs in Latin:


(51) Latin (Indo-European)
        Timeo ne         id [….] astute       fecerint
        I.fear     NEG   it       astutely    do:3PL.PERF.SBJ.
        ‘I fear that they did (*not) it astutely.’ (Cic. Caec. 4)


This type of construction with the ‘fear verbs’ (‘verba timendi’) was maintained in the
Romance languages up to the present times (see Grieve–Smith 2009: 20):


(52) Old French (Indo-European; J. Bodel, Jeu de St. Nicolas, ca. 1200)
        J’ai paour qu’ele ne t’escape
        ‘I’m afraid she will get away from you.’
(53)
a. French (Indo-European)
     Jean a peur qu’elle ne soit malade
b. Italian (Indo-European)
     Giovanni teme che lei non sia malata
c. Portuguese (Indo-European)
     Juan teme que ela não esteja doente
     ‘John is afraid that she be (*not) ill.’

25
     Humbert (1986, §184) calls this construct ‘subjonctif d’appréhension’ and gives examples from
Homer, Herodotus, and Plato.


                                                                                                     26
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


6. Expletive (?) Negation


The question mark alludes to the fact that not all (apparent) ENs are truly expletive,
i.e., pleonastic or vacuous. Note first that there are contexts which implicitly invite
inserting NEG: if I say ‘the bar is open from nine until as long as there are clients‘
(translation of the Lithuanian example (38) in Wälchli 2018: 186), I am implicitly
saying that that bar remains open until there are no longer clients: in Italian it would
be Il bar resta aperto finché non ci sono più clienti, and not *…finché ci sono più clienti;
in Spanish el bar está abierto hasta que no hayan más clientes and not *…hasta que
hayan más clientes.
   For their part, Kehayov & Boye (2016) find that in complements of verbs of fear,
the Russian complementation marker system encodes the distinction between a
remotely possible threat and a more real threat: kak refers to a feared state of affairs
portrayed as only remotely possible, while čto conveys a real threat. Many other fine-
grained observations have been made in different studies, mainly those dedicated to
a single language or a restricted language family. Thus, for instance, Greco (2020: 2
and passim) has studied an unnoticed usage of EN in Italian, namely the ‘Surprise
Negation Sentences’ such as:


(54) Italian (Indo-European)
      E      non mi          è scesa       dal           treno   Maria   ?!
      And NEG to.me          is got        off.the       train   Mary    ?!
      ‘Mary (to my surprise) got off the train!’


meaning ‘Mary (to my surprise) got off the train!’, with strong pragmatic effects.
However, the crucial point is that, concerning negative comparison (Section 3), we
have already seen that EN is very frequently used in comparative constructions (cf.
Stassen’s statement quoted above and the examples (43)-(45)). In Old French we find
(see Grieve-Smith 2009: 20):


(55) Old French (Indo-European; Ordo Representacionis Ade, ca.1160)
      Es plus fresche que n’ est rose
      ‘You are fresher than a rose.’




                                                                                         27
Ramat                                                             Expletive negation and related problems


(56) Old French (Indo-European; Graal 107, 25)
       Et en cele biauté sans faille m’enorguilli un poi plus que je ne deusse
       ‘Je fus plus orgueilleuse de ma beauté que je n’aurais dû’ (Queffélec 1988: 421)
       ‘I have been prouder of my beauty than I should (*not) have been.’


This construction is still used in Modern French, though it is possible to cancel the ne:


(57) French (Indo-European)
       Ce      travail est   plus      difficile   que je (n’)          avais imaginé
       ‘This work is more difficult than I (*NEG) had thought.’


In this kind of inequality comparison, the second member (e.g., the rose) refers to a
state of affairs which is negated (i.e., it has a nonveridical status; cf. Delfitto 2020):
‘the rose is not fresher than the dame’; or ‘the dame is fresh, the rose is not’; and
similarly ‘I did not imagine this work be so difficult’. In this kind of comparison, NEG
is not expletive/vacuous in the same sense that ‘expletive’ is used in the examples
examined in the previous sections (e.g., Russ. Poka ja ne zabyl, in (11)): ‘before I
(*not) forget’). These constructs of inequality comparison may provide the reason the
NEG   marker may become the comparison marker tout court as in Sanskrit: mŗtamֹ śreyo
na jīvitam (see above, Section 4; Viti 2002). According to Wälchli (LINGTYP, 12 Jan.
2022), “typical comparative examples with ‘expletive’ negation are all comparison of
inequality (which strengthens my point that ‘expletive’ negation can have something
to do with non-identity)”.
  In (56) from Graal 107, the speaker thinks for sure that ‘I should not have been
too much proud of my beauty’. Compare this example with the following (from Jin &
Koenig 2021: 61):


(58) French (Indo-European)
       Je regrette qu’il     ne     faille              souvent      attendre         des
       I regret that.it NEG should:3SG.SBJ often                     wait             ART.INDF

       années       avant    que l’histoire        ne     juge                  les     tyrans.
       years        before that the.history        NEG    judge:3SG.SBJ         the tyrants.
       ‘I regret that it often should take years before history judges tyrants.’




                                                                                                      28
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


The difference lies in the ‘nonveridical’ status of je regrette qu’il ne, etc., while Graal
107 refers to a statement (m’énourguilli ‘I became proud’) that reports a situation
which the speaker considers to have been true in the past.
   The same holds for:


(59) French (Indo-European; Jin & Koenig 2021)
      Niez-vous qu’il        ne     soit-3SG.SBJ     un   grand   artiste?
      deny-you that.he NEG           be              a    great   artist
      ‘Do you deny that he is (*not) a great artist?’


The speaker is sure that the person he’s speaking about is a great artist, but he thinks
that his/her conversation partner has a different opinion; therefore, he uses an
interrogative construction which entails a subjunctive (soit), typical of a nonveridical
status. The speaker intends to say p, but the verb ‘deny’ triggers a ¬p.
   The conclusion is that the presence / absence of EN depends (particularly in
subordinated clauses) on the semantics of the individual lexical items (cf. Jin &
Koenig 2021: 59): see the different constructs of avoir peur (‘to be afraid’) and souhaiter
‘to wish’ mentioned in Section 2. Moreover, grammatical descriptions (particularly of
French) do not provide a consistent definition, particularly regarding the correctness
of the usages. Some grammarians consider EN as not belonging to standard French. In
fact, its usages vary in spoken language and extend to various construction types. In
standard, prototypical NegConc, two or more negative elements yield a single
semantic negation (see Section 3), but often a NEG element can be inserted
emphasizing the negativity value of the utterance. Consequently, NegConc acquires
an EN as in the Russian example quoted above as (15), Nikto ničego ne skazal lit.
Nobody nothing not said i.e. ‘Nobody said anything’.
   As Wälchli (2018: 152) writes,


      a range of similar, but different, meanings are expressed by the same form and are
      treated as if they were the same thing although they are slightly different
      meanings, [and] cross-linguistically recurrent identity of form reflects similarity
      in meaning.


It seems that this applies to EN as well.




                                                                                            29
Ramat                                                         Expletive negation and related problems


     Conclusion: we can imagine that EN started in (inequality) comparisons where the
second member of the comparison is implicitly negated as in the Sanskrit NEG ná
(mŗtaֹm śreyo ná jīvitam) and in (55) es plus fresche que n’est rose; i.e., ‘la rose n’est pas
si fraîche comme tu l’es’. As already noted, Old French is particularly rich in this type
(see Vendryes 1950: 5ff.):


(60) Old French (Indo-European; Perceval 5443)
       Ele    vaut miauz   que vos     ne       feites
       ‘She is worthier than you (* NEG) think.’


EN   extended further to the other constructs triggered by operators such as ‘deny’,
‘unless’, or ‘before’ that implicitly invited a (negative) comparison, as we have
discussed in the previous sections, until it finally expanded to other domains such as
NegConc and fear verb constructions, under the pragmatic need of the speaker to
enhance the negative meaning of the sentence. Compare the Russian sentences:


(61) Russian (Indo-European; Wälchli 2018: 151)
       Poka                stanet                  temno,        ja      eščë    porabotaju
       as.long.as/until    become:PFV.PRS.3SG dark:N.SG I                yet     DLM:work:PFV

       ‘Until it has become dark, I’ll still (manage to) work a bit.’


(62) Russian (Indo-European; Wälchli 2018: 149)
       Ja porobotaju,      poka                          ne      stalo                  temno
       I DLM:work:PFV      as.long.as/until/before       not become:PST.N.SG            dark:N.SG
       ‘I’ll work a bit, before it (*not) gets dark.’


In the second sentence, NEG is semantically unnecessary since the fact that it will get
dark is a matter of fact, but NEG is inserted according the ‘opportunity.before’ scheme.
Wälchli (2018) has based his study on a temporal comparison considering how a
sample of languages (mainly the Baltic languages) comes to grips with the concepts
‘AS LONG AS’,’UNTIL’ and ‘BEFORE’. He concludes there has been a gradual
expansion of NEG and EN beyond the temporal domain. My article concludes that the
origin of EN lies in inequality comparisons, but we have seen above that concepts such
as ‘UNTIL’ and ‘BEFORE’ implicitly entail a comparison between two states of affairs:




                                                                                                  30
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 2-2 (2022): 1-38


consider, for example, the Latin ante quam (‘before’) where quam is the typical
comparative form:


(63) Latin (Indo-European; Cic., Cato Maior, 50)
         Sex annis antequam ego natus sum
         ‘Six years before I was born.’


(64) Latin (Indo-European; Cic., Cat., 4,20)
         nunc antequam […] ad sententiam redeo, de me pauca dicam
         ‘now before […] I return to the sentence, I’ll say a few things about me.’


Whether we start from the temporal dimension or the predicative one (plus fresche
que), both underline the progressive expansion of the EN from the core concept of
comparison,26 where the second member is (more or less) implicitly negated:


(65) French (Indo-european)
         Je suis parti avant qu’il ne soit arrivé
         ‘I left before he arrived.’


7. Final summary


This paper maintains that various negative constructions, already alluded to in the
abstract, crucially obey the psychological, and hence pragmatic, need of the speaker
to enhance and intensify the negative import of the sentence. Thus, we have Negative
Concord where two or more negative elements yield a single semantic negation.
Consequently, some negative elements in the sentence may be redundant, ‘expletive’.
Expletive Negation is mostly and originally found in inequality comparisons –
including temporal comparisons – where the second member of the comparison is
implicitly negated. Expletive Negation is also found with fear verbs that implicitly
invite a negative comparison.



26
     In 1974, Seuren had already proposed that comparative clauses implicitly involve semantic negation,
as clearly surfaces in languages such as Nahuatl (43), Hixkaryána (44), or Telugu (45). More precisely,
we have to speak of comparative clauses expressing inequality: Mary is taller than John = John is not
as tall as Mary.


                                                                                                     31
Ramat                                                                 Expletive negation and related problems


Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to Giuliano Bernini, who carefully read and commented on a
first draft of this article. Thanks are due also to two anonymous reviewers for their
very useful suggestions. Obviously, all remaining errors are mine.27


Abbreviations


 1 = 1st person                                        NCI(s)   = Negative Concord Item(s)
 3 = 3 person
          rd
                                                       NEG    = Negation
 ABS    = Absolute                                     NEG# = NEG’s      final position
 ACC    =Accusative                                    NEG1 =NEG’s     first member
 AOR    = Aorist                                       NEG2 =NEG’s     second member
 ART    = Article                                      NegComp = Negative Comparison
 COMPL= Complementizer                                 NegConc = Negative Concord
 COND    = Conditional                                 NOM    = Nominative
 COP    = Copula                                       NPI(s)   = Negative Polarity Item(s)
 DET    = Determinative                                PA    = Active Participle
 DLM    = Delimitative                                 PERF   = Perfect
 EN    = Expletive Negation                            PFV   = Perfective
 F   = Feminine                                        PRO    = Pronoun
 HORT    = Hortative                                   PROG     = Progressive
 IMP   = Imperative                                    PRS   = Present
 IMPF   = Imperfect                                    PST   = Past
 IND   = Indicative                                    PTCP   = Particple
 INDF   = Indefinite                                   RFL   = Reflexive
 INS   = Instrumental                                  SBJ   = Subjunctive
 IPFV   = Imperfective                                 SCL   = Clitic Subject
 M    = Masculine                                      SG   = Singular
 N   = Neuter                                          SUB   = Co-subordinating Particle


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     Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to look in the important book Intorno alla negazione. Analisi di
contesti negativi dalle lingue antiche al Romanzo. Atti della giornata di studi, Roma 26 febbraio 2009, a
cura di Mauro Lasagna, Anna Orlandini, Paolo Poccetti. Pisa – Roma: Serra Editore 2012, only when
this article was finished and the proofs were ready.


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Ramat                                              Expletive negation and related problems


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CONTACT
paoram@unipv.it




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