The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present, Jessica Rett (UC Los Angeles) speaking on Ambidirectionality and apparently expletive negation.

This is an in-person event. You can also join virtually via Zoom.

Some constructions in some languages involve expletive negation (EN): negation that seems to not affect the truth conditions of the sentence. For example, the Italian A è più alto di quanto (non) sia B (“A is taller than B (isn’t)”). I follow others (Greco 2018, Halm and Huszár 2021) in assuming there are two kinds of EN. For me, this amounts to the fact that there are two different ways a negation can fail to affect truth conditions: 1) high EN involves negation that targets non-truth-conditional content, and 2) low EN involves negation that targets clauses that display what I call ambidirectionality: the property of being ambiguous between a proposition and its negation. In this talk, I focus on the latter, arguing that ambidirectionality answers two urgent questions in the context of expletive negation: it explains why we only get (low) EN in scalar constructions (cf. Cépeda 2018); and it explains several subtle semantic differences between a given construction and its (expletive-) negated counterpart.

Over the course of each year, the Linguistics department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world. For full speaker and event information, please visit: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html