Negation-Licensed Commands

The main goal of this article is to argue for the existence and crosslinguistic stability of a phenomenon that I call “negation-licensed commands” (NLCs), in which commands can be interpreted as such only in the presence of negation. The article explores morphosyntactic properties of NLCs in a small number of unrelated languages. It stops short of an analysis of the phenomenon, which will have to await future research.

[1]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  The Maturation of Grammatical Principles: Evidence from Russian Unaccusatives , 2001, Linguistic Inquiry.

[2]  G. Kjellmer.  ‘There is no hiding you in the house’: On a modal use of the English gerund 1 , 1980 .

[3]  Paul Portner,et al.  Permission and Choice , 2012 .

[4]  Catherine V. Chvany,et al.  On the syntax of be-sentences in Russian , 1977 .

[5]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar , 1972 .

[6]  Arhonto Terzi,et al.  Imperatives, V-movement and logical mood , 1995, Journal of Linguistics.

[7]  Sue Brown.  The Syntax of Negation in Russian: A Minimalist Approach , 1999 .

[8]  Chung-hye Han,et al.  The Structure and Interpretation of Imperatives: Mood and Force in Universal Grammar , 2000 .

[9]  Roland R. Hausser,et al.  Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood , 1980 .

[10]  Hagit Borer,et al.  The VP within Process Nominals: Evidence from Adverbs and the VP Anaphor Do-So , 2001 .

[11]  Despina Oikonomou.  Covert modals in root contexts , 2016 .

[12]  Patrick Georg Grosz,et al.  German Particles, Modality, and the Semantics of Imperatives , 2008 .

[13]  G. Postma.  The Argumental Licensing of the Perfect Tense , 1996 .

[14]  B. Partee.  Topic, Focus and Quantification , 1991 .

[15]  M. Halliday.  A course in spoken English : intonation , 1970 .

[16]  Steven Abney,et al.  The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect , 1972 .

[17]  H. Zeijlstra.  On French negation , 2010 .

[18]  Johan Rooryck,et al.  On participial imperatives , 2007 .

[19]  Leonard H. Babby,et al.  Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian , 1982 .

[20]  Hedde Zeijlstra,et al.  Not in the first place , 2013 .

[21]  Greg Carlson,et al.  On the Semantic Composition of English Generic Sentences , 1989 .

[22]  P. Portner.  Imperatives and modals , 2007 .

[23]  C. Condoravdi.  Imperatives: Meaning and Illocutionary Force , 2011 .

[24]  Günther Grewendorf,et al.  Discourse and grammar : from sentence types to lexical categories , 2012 .

[25]  Deirdre Wilson,et al.  Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences , 1988 .

[26]  O. Jespersen.  A modern English grammar on historical principles , 1928 .

[27]  P. Grosz.  Modal particles in rationale clauses and related constructions , 2014 .

[28]  K. Fintel,et al.  Anatomy of a Modal Construction , 2007, Linguistic Inquiry.

[29]  Paul Miok Raffaella Portner,et al.  The speaker-addressee relation at the syntax-semantics interface , 2019, Language.