Abstract
Negated complements of negative implicatives in Vietnamese have a reading in which they are logically equivalent to their non-negated counterpart. We propose an analysis which predicts the distribution of such “pleonastic” occurrences of negation and show that it can account for the distribution of another case of pleonasm in Vietnamese: pleonastic modals. The analysis assumes the possibility of multidominance and contains a proposal on the linearization of syntactic structure.
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Acknowledgements
For valuable input which helped improve the paper, I thank Lisa Cheng, Nicholas Fleisher, Andreas Haida, Claire Halpert, Tim Hunter, Roni Katzir, Hamid Ouali, David Pesetsky, Norvin Richards, the audiences at UWM S-Group, UMN Linguistics Colloquium, ZAS Berlin and TEAL-9, as well as two anonymous reviewers of JEAL. All mistakes are my own.
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Trinh, T. When is not not not?. J East Asian Linguist 26, 411–438 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-017-9163-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-017-9163-z