Speaker: Karen De Clercq (CNRS/LLF/Université Paris Cité)
Title: The internal structure of sentential negation: A view from suppletion
Date: Thu 18 April
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Time: 16.15 – 17.30
There are four different ways in which TAM-morphology and sentential negators (SNs) may interact, summarised in (1).
| (1) | Type A | TAM | ⇔ | SN | Bengali/Bambara |
| Type B | TAM | ⇒ | SN | Latin | |
| Type C | TAM | ⇐ | SN | Tamazight | |
| Type D | TAM | SN | Dutch/English |
A first possible situation is one in which TAM conditions the SN, and the SN conditions TAM (Type A), resulting in suppletive negative and TAM morphology. This is the situation in Bengali (Ramchand 2004, De Clercq 2020) or Bambara (Koopman 1992, De Clercq 2020). Type B is one where only TAM-morphology conditions the SN (Horn 2001, Dahl 1979). This is the case in Latin, which has non as a standard negator, but resorts to the suppletive modal marker ne (Pinkster 2015, Lakey 2015, Gianollo 2016) in the context of the subjunctive to give rise to wish clauses and prohibitives (Baunaz & Lander 2023). Type C concerns languages where the presence of the SN changes the way TAM-morphology is expressed on the verbal predicate (Miestamo 2005). This is for instance the case in Tamazight (Ouali 2012:ch. 8), where the presence of the SN ur triggers suppletion in the perfective form of verbal root. A last logical option is one in which neither TAM nor SN seem to interact morphologically, as is for instance the case in Dutch or standard English (Type D).
In this talk I will discuss 1° the first results of a large-scale ongoing typological study on the interaction between TAM and sentential negation, and 2° the internal structure of sentential negative markers from the perspective of the suppletion that arises between negation and the TAM-domain. To this end, I will zoom in on case studies of Bambara/Bengali (Type A), Latin (Type B) and Tamazight (Type C).