Papers by Frances Blanchette
Anymore, this feature varies: An experimental study of non-polarity <i>anymore</i>
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 17, 2024
This construction needs understood: An experimental study of the Alternative Embedded Passive (AEP)
American speech, Jul 10, 2024
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, Mar 3, 2018
Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negat... more Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single semantic one (e.g., the 'I ate nothing' reading of "I didn't eat nothing"), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. 'It is not the case that I ate nothing'). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports microparametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation.
Romance Parsed Corpora
Linguistic variation, Jul 13, 2018
Frontiers in Psychology, Nov 12, 2019
and Alsenoy (2016, p. 483) on the frequency of negative structure types across languages. 3 See G... more and Alsenoy (2016, p. 483) on the frequency of negative structure types across languages. 3 See Giannakidou (2000) for a semantic account, discussed further below. structure types, as in the following examples from Tortora et al. (2017) The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE) 4. (See Childs, 2017 for an analysis of this type of variation in British vernacular speech corpora.) (3) They wasn't a radio, they wasn't anything. 'There wasn't a radio, there wasn't anything.' (AAPCAppE: ALC-FJ-733-1, 0.343) (4) They wasn't nothing for them to get into. 'There wasn't anything for them to get into.' (AAPCAppE: ALC-FJ-733-1, 0.478) Speakers may even employ both construction types within a single utterance, as in the following example from an Appalachian English speaker (cited in Blanchette, 2016, p.
Glossa, Jul 13, 2017
This paper presents a series of quantitative gradient acceptability judgment studies of English n... more This paper presents a series of quantitative gradient acceptability judgment studies of English negative sentences. Adult native speakers of American English recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk were asked to rate sentences on a scale of 1 to 7 on the basis of their naturalness. The main study compares sentences with the marker n't and either a negative object (e.g. 'John didn't eat nothing') or a negative subject in canonical position ('nobody didn't eat'). Each sentence type has two possible interpretations, one in which the two negatives contribute a single semantic negation, the so-called Negative Concord reading, and another in which the two negations yield a semantic Double Negation logically equivalent to an affirmative. While mean acceptability ratings were below the median for all items, statistical analyses of the gradient data revealed that speakers prefer Negative Concord over Double Negation readings for sentences with negative objects. To rule out a processing explanation for the preference for negative objects over sentence initial negatives, a follow-up study tested the acceptability of sentences with a single negative subject or object and no negative marker. This revealed a preference for subjects, suggesting that the object preference in the two negatives study is a true grammatical effect. A third study revealed that Double Negation constructions are unacceptable overall even in explicit denial contexts, and a fourth study added Negative Auxiliary Inversion constructions (e.g. 'Didn't nobody eat'), to compare three types of Negative Concord. The results of all four studies are argued to reveal an English grammar that generates both Negative Concord and Double Negation, and in which Negative Concord is generated despite its unacceptability and reported absence in usage.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Jan 27, 2022
Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in wh... more Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "non-mainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are comprehended in Persons with Aphasia (PWA). This paper presents the results of a pilot study exploring how PWA respond to linguistic stimuli that include the vernacular feature, Negative Concord (NC), often referred to by the more colloquial term "double negative" (e.g., I didn't do nothing, equivalent to I didn't do anything). Methods: Twelve PWA in the chronic stage of recovery each rated the naturalness and felicity of 48 critical sentences and 64 fillers, all of which contained two clauses, the second clause describing a consequence of the first. Ratings were analyzed using ordinal regression. Results: PWA rated NC sentences as unacceptable, but felicitous-a pattern similar to that shown by neurologically intact adults in a previous study (Blanchette & Lukyanenko, 2019b). Conclusion: These results suggest that PWA are sensitive to both social and linguistic information at levels similar to neurologically intact speakers. These results have implications for the integration of vernacular features into future research, assessment, and treatment protocols for PWA.
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 7, 2020
This chapter discusses the relevance of data from non-standard varieties to our under standing of... more This chapter discusses the relevance of data from non-standard varieties to our under standing of natural language negation, and in particular, to theories which seek to model and explain natural language properties. The chapter focuses specifically on the different types of Negative Concord exhibited in non-standard Englishes, in West Flemish, and in Romance varieties, showing that in relation to Standard English, Standard Dutch, and Standard French, these non-standard languages exhibit much more intricate points of syntactic variation. The theoretical relevance of subject/non-subject asymmetries, the lex ical nature of postverbal negative constituents, and intra-speaker variability in the ex pression of negation are discussed. The syntactic structures examined reveal that when non-standard languages serve as the main reference point in linguistic theory, this ex tends the hypothesis space in crucial ways, and more fruitful and revealing cross-linguis tic comparisons can be made.
American Speech, Aug 1, 2020
This study investigates how American English speakers from within and outside the Appalachian reg... more This study investigates how American English speakers from within and outside the Appalachian region interpret negative auxiliary inversion (NAI). Previously observed in Appalachian and other English varieties, NAI has surface syntax similar to yes-no questions, but receives a declarative interpretation (e.g., didn't everybody watch Superbowl 53, meaning 'not everybody watched'). Previous work shows that NAI is associated with a reading in which some but not all people participated in an event, as opposed to one in which no one participated. Results from an interpretation task revealed that Appalachian participants tended to obtain the not all and not the no one reading for NAI. In contrast, non-Appalachian participants' interpretations exhibited greater inter-and intraspeaker variability. Appalachian participants with more not all interpretations reported positive attitudes toward NAI use, and they also distinguished between attested and unattested syntactic subject types (e.g. everybody, many people, *few people) in a naturalness rating task. Appalachian participants with more no one interpretations had more negative attitudes toward NAI use, and made no distinction between subject types. These results
On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion
Canadian Journal of Linguistics, Sep 18, 2018
This article presents a novel analysis ofNegative Auxiliary Inversion(NAI) constructions such asd... more This article presents a novel analysis ofNegative Auxiliary Inversion(NAI) constructions such asdidn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.
This paper presents the results of an experimental study on gradient acceptability of English sen... more This paper presents the results of an experimental study on gradient acceptability of English sentences with two negatives such as 'John didn't eat nothing' and 'nobody didn't eat'. These sentences have two possible interpretations. In the Negative Concord interpretation, the two negatives contribute a single semantic negation (e.g. 'John ate nothing'). In the Double Negation interpretation, each negative contributes a semantic negation, yielding a logical affirmative (e.g. 'John ate something'). Negative Concord is heavily stigmatized in contemporary English. The results of this study show that despite their overall unacceptability, Negative Concord sentences with a negative object are significantly more acceptable than Negative Concord sentences with a negative subject. This subject-object asymmetry is not present in Double Negation sentences, which are equally unacceptable with negative subjects and negative objects. This paper discusses how these results support the hypothesis that Negative Concord constructions have the same underlying structure as Negative Polarity Item constructions (e.g. John didn't eat anything), which also exhibit subject-object asymmetries in acceptability (cf. *Anybody didn't eat.
for helping to make the CUNY GC an engaging, exciting, and happy place to work. viii My fellow st... more for helping to make the CUNY GC an engaging, exciting, and happy place to work. viii My fellow students also deserve many thanks. I am very grateful to Ignacio Montoya for his collaboration in work, and for his friendship in life. I consider myself very lucky to have found such an intelligent and kind collaborator and friend in Ignacio. I am also very grateful to Teresa O'Neill for collaboration, friendship, support, and inspiration. Thanks also to my cohort, and in particular Emily Wilson, for helping make my introduction to the field of Linguistics extra interesting and fun. I'd also like to thank fellow students
Language and Cognition, Mar 1, 2019
This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers' processing of se... more This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers' processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn't fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn't answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the 'she answered something' reading of she didn't answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the 'she answered nothing' reading of she didn't answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types. [*] A subset of these findings were presented at the 2019 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. We gratefully acknowledge Katherine Muschler for her assistance running the study, Karen Miller for lending us her equipment, and the support of Penn State's Center for Language Science. We are also grateful for comments and questions from three anonymous reviewers and our colleagues Laurel Brehm and Hossein Karimi, which have made this paper better.
Overlook linguistic diversity and regional differences in how people speak Overlook important... more Overlook linguistic diversity and regional differences in how people speak Overlook important differences in meaning that can be expressed by nonstandardized forms Lead to inaccurate characterizations of individuals who use non-standardized forms in their own speech Wolfram, Walt and Donna Christian. 1976. Appalachian Speech. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Negative Concord in English
Linguistic variation, Dec 18, 2013
This paper argues that Negative Concord is generated by the grammars of all English varieties, bu... more This paper argues that Negative Concord is generated by the grammars of all English varieties, but just not “realized” in the standardized variety, in the sense of Barbiers (2005, 2009). I show that Double Negation constructions, wherein two negative elements yield a doubly negated meaning, are formed identically by English varieties that realize Negative Concord and those that do not. Unlike previous Minimalist Agree approaches to English Negative Concord, this proposal accounts for the fact that English varieties generate both Double Negation and Negative Concord constructions. This paper employs Tortora’s (2009, in press) mechanism of feature spreading, and López’s (2009) derivational assignment of the pragmatic feature [contrast], to successfully capture the facts of Negative Concord and Double Negation in English. In so doing, it contributes insight into the representation of sentential negation, and supports the Barbiersian notion that not all grammatical structures are realized in a given variety.
Adaptation at the Syntax–Semantics Interface: Evidence From a Vernacular Structure
Language and Speech
Expanding on psycholinguistic research on linguistic adaptation, the phenomenon whereby speakers ... more Expanding on psycholinguistic research on linguistic adaptation, the phenomenon whereby speakers change how they comprehend or produce structures as a result of cumulative exposure to less frequent or unfamiliar linguistic structures, this study asked whether speakers can learn semantic and syntactic properties of the American English vernacular negative auxiliary inversion (NAI) structure (e.g., didn’t everybody eat, meaning “not everybody ate”) during the course of an experiment. Formal theoretical analyses of NAI informed the design of a task in which American English-speaking participants unfamiliar with this structure were exposed to NAI sentences in either semantically ambiguous or unambiguous contexts. Participants rapidly adapted to the interpretive properties of NAI, selecting responses similar to what would be expected of a native speaker after only limited exposure to semantically ambiguous input. On a separate ratings task, participants displayed knowledge of syntactic r...
Comprehension of vernacular features in aphasia (Sandberg et al., 2022)
<b>Purpose: </b>Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistical... more <b>Purpose: </b>Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are comprehended in people with aphasia (PWA). This article presents the results of a pilot study exploring how PWA respond to linguistic stimuli that include the vernacular feature, negative concord (NC), often referred to by the more colloquial term <i>double negative</i> (e.g.,<i> I didn't do nothing</i>, equivalent to <i>I didn't do anything</i>).<b>Method: </b>Twelve PWA in the chronic stage of recovery each rated the naturalness and felicity of 48 critical sentences and 64 fillers, all of which contained two clauses, the second clause describing a consequence of the first. Ratings were analyzed using ordinal regression.<b>Results: </b>PWA rated NC sentences as unacceptable, but felicitous—a pattern similar to that shown by neurologically intact adults in a previous study. <b>Conclusions:</b> These results suggest that PWA are sensitive to both social and linguistic information at levels similar to neurologically intact speakers. These results have implications for the integration of vernacular features into future research, assessment, and treatment protocols for PWA.<br><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Stimuli: Complete list of items and fillers. <br><b>Supplemental Material S2. </b>Demographic questions.<br>Sandberg, C. W., Blanchette, F., &amp; Lukyanenko, C. (2022). Comprehension of vernacular features in aphasia. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.</i> Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00408
Journal of Pragmatics, 2018
This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of single and Double Negation (DN) readings of En... more This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of single and Double Negation (DN) readings of English negative indefinites in questioneanswer pairs. Productions of four negative words (no one, nobody, nothing, and nowhere) were elicited from 20 native English speakers as responses to negative questions such as "What didn't you eat?" in contexts designed to generate either a single negation reading or a logically affirmative DN reading. A control condition with no negation in the question was employed for comparison. A verification question following each item determined whether tokens were interpreted as expected and, therefore, produced with the target interpretation. Statistical analysis of the f0 curves revealed a significant difference: DN is associated with a higher fundamental frequency than single negation. In contrast, the single negative and control conditions were not significantly different with respect to f0. Analysis of the verification question responses showed significant differences between all three conditions (Control > DN > single negation), suggesting that single negation is more difficult to interpret than DN as a response to a negative question. The results are compared with previous work on Romance, and we demonstrate how English behaves like a prototypical Negative Concord language in that DN is the prosodically marked form.
On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 2018
This article presents a novel analysis of Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI) constructions such a... more This article presents a novel analysis of Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI) constructions such as didn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2017
This paper presents a series of quantitative gradient acceptability judgment studies of English n... more This paper presents a series of quantitative gradient acceptability judgment studies of English negative sentences. Adult native speakers of American English recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk were asked to rate sentences on a scale of 1 to 7 on the basis of their naturalness. The main study compares sentences with the marker n’t and either a negative object (e.g. ‘John didn’t eat nothing’) or a negative subject in canonical position (‘nobody didn’t eat’). Each sentence type has two possible interpretations, one in which the two negatives contribute a single semantic negation, the so-called Negative Concord reading, and another in which the two negations yield a semantic Double Negation logically equivalent to an affirmative. While mean acceptability ratings were below the median for all items, statistical analyses of the gradient data revealed that speakers prefer Negative Concord over Double Negation readings for sentences with negative objects. To rule out a processing explan...
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Papers by Frances Blanchette