French polar response particles and neg movement
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French polar response particles and neg movement Jérémy Pasquereau1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract I present new data from European French involving embedded polar response particles (a.k.a. yes/no particles) in response to negative questions and develop a novel proposal which integrates the insights of previous analyses (e.g. Holmberg in Lingua 128:31– 50, 2013; Roelofsen and Farkas in Language 91(2):359–414, 2015). The main puzzle has to do with the interpretation of non ‘no’ (bare or followed by a clause), which may assert its antecedent or the negation of its antecedent. It is shown that the meaning of non-responses varies as a function of the scope of negation with respect to various operators in its antecedent. Polar response particles in French are analyzed as the spell-out of a Polarity head which has moved from a lower position. The various interpretations of polar response particles are modelled as being constrained by the interaction between the necessity of the movement of the Polarity head and a constraint on scope preservation. The ramifications of this proposal for related phenomena (e.g. ‘low negation’ in English, N-word responses) are then discussed. Keywords Polar response particles · Quantifiers · Negation · Movement of negation · Scope preservation
This work was partly supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) under Grant AH/P002471/1.
B 1
Jérémy Pasquereau [email protected] University of Surrey, 388 Stag Hill, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK
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J. Pasquereau
1 Introduction This paper is about polar response particles (PRPs) in European French—that is, oui, non, and si—and how the choice of covert clauses in their complement determines their interpretation.1 By probing the interaction of quantifiers with negation in these covert clauses, it proposes a new analysis of these particles that builds on the insights of previous work on yes/no particles. I propose that PRPs spell out a Polarity head, which can have two different origins: it can be the copy of the Polarity head of the covert clause in its complement, or it can be a covert Polarity head that has been inserted as a last resort if there is an identity mismatch between the covert clause and the initiative the PRP responds to. The main puzzle is illustrated by the contrast between (1) and (2): in response to the negative question in (1A), bare unstressed non in (1B) must signal agreement with the questioned proposition in A,2 but in response to (2A) with unspecific quelqu’un ‘someone’, the same non-response cannot agree and must instead reverse the questioned proposition ‘Someone has not yet been received’. (1)
A: Est- ce qu’ ils n’ ont pas encore été reçus ? is
it
that they neg have neg yet
been received
‘Have they not been received yet?’ B: Je crois que non. = agreement / *reversal I
believe that no
‘I believe that they have not.’ (2)
Context: A physician is surprised to be done with patient consultations earlier than she expected. She asks her secretary: A: Est- ce que quelqu’un n’ a is
it
that someone
pas enc
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