PRIN: Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale – Bando 2022

“An integrated approach to negation: core syntactic processes, lexical structure, and linguistic microvariation“

Principal Investigator:

Maria Rita Manzini, Università di Firenze

Associated Investigator:

Cecilia Poletto, Università degli studi di Padova

Project description

The present research project aims at investigating sentential negation based on data from Romance microvariation. Negation is a fundamental property of human language and closely intertwined with human cognitive capacity, allowing speakers and hearers to reason about what is not the case. Not only does it express one of the most clearly defined and well-circumscribed grammatical functions, it also interacts strongly with various domains of grammar and cognition. As such, negation constitutes an ideal test case in order to pin down cognitive processes that are purely linguistic in nature. Whenever negation is present, it is always symbiotic with other grammatical processes (for instance Focus).

This project concentrates on two exemplary phenomena particularly well-suited to better understanding two basic types of interaction. The first phenomenon concerns the interaction with modality in negative imperatives, where only some types of negative markers have a blocking effect on imperative morphology. We intend to concentrate on a) the reason of this blocking effect and b) how verbal suppletion and/or specialized modal negations resolve it. The second phenomenon concerns interaction with negative indefinites, i.e. variable negative concord, where the negative marker has the effect of licensing. We seek to understand a) why only negative concord with preverbal negative indefinites is variable and b) which factors condition this variability. The basic hypothesis to be tested is that these interactions come about because sentential negation has in its internal constituency the same components (e.g. quantificational, modal) found in the grammatical categories it interacts with – as the etymological sources of neg-words (e.g. neg-quantifier) also seems to suggest.

From the point of view of the data resources available for the research, the two largest corpora to date relating to syntactic variation in the Italo-Romance domain have been published by members of two units – namely the Manzini and Savoia (2005) and the ASIt corpus (Atlante Sintattico Italiano). In this respect, we also pursue objectives related to the accessibility and integration of the dialectological data and to their availability for research purposes. We will transfer on digital support and manual annotation of the relevant portions of the Savoia corpus and extract the relevant metadata from both corpora.

The type of study we have detailed has some more general implications: it raises the issue of the proper treatment of large data sets (corpora or other) within formal models of grammar. Studies like the present one can also further our understanding of the relation Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca between typological variation (microvariation) and fine variation within a language family or subfamily. Finally, optimizing accessibility of our corpora to scholars may contribute to the general goal of preserving linguistic variety as an intangible part of our cultural heritage.

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