Explaining the dominance of postverbal negation in South American indigenous languages.

South American languages offer a puzzle for linguists studying negation. Cross-linguistic comparison of standard negation reveals a universal tendency for languages to have a clausal negator before the verb. This tendency was first observed by Jespersen (1917); it is referred to as the Negative-First Principle (Horn 1989, 2001) and has been confirmed by a number of cross-linguistic studies since then (e.g. Dryer 2013). South American indigenous languages, however, do not follow this tendency and primarily use a clausal negator after the verb. This pattern is found in related and unrelated languages all across the South American continent. It is, in fact, the only macro-area where this pattern is dominant (Vossen 2016). This puzzle has not been explored systematically yet, let alone explained. The project aims to account for the dominant pattern of post-verbal negation in South American languages by exploring it from diachronic, typological and language contact perspectives.

Keywords:TYPOLOGY, LINGUISTICS

Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies

Project type:Collaboration project