Computational Linguistics Colloquium
Thursday, 17 January, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7 4
Two functions of German sentential negation
Wolfgang KleinMax-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik,
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Typically, a German sentence is negated by the particle "nicht" ("not"), which can be inserted at various positions; accordingly, it affects the meaning of the entire sentence in different ways, which goes far beyond traditional distinctions such as "sentence negation" and "constituent negation". In this paper, it is argued that the negation particle - and some variants of it, such as "kein" - combine two functions, called here "difference function" and "incompatibility function". The former is scope-dependent; it serves to mark that, according to the speaker, some "different sentence" than the one in which the particle is contained is true. The latter, which accounts for the familiar notion of truth-reversal, is not scope-dependent; it marks that the proposition expressed by the underlying sentence and the proposition expressed by the "other sentence" are incompatible. The scope of "nicht" primarily depends on its position; as a rule, it "goes to the right"; some apparent exceptions are shown to result from familiar properties of German syntax. It is also shown that the negation does not associate with the focus of the sentence; it always makes the same meaning contribution, independent of its position and the focus structure of the sentence.
If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact
Manfred Pinkal.