From: daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: NegV vs. NegQ
Date: 9 Apr 92 01:48:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: uflorida.35047
Organization: Univ. of Florida CIS Dept.

In article <11838@tamsun.tamu.edu> e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand) writes:

# WARNING: This is a long and boring response.  Apologies to
# everyone. I couldn't help myself.

Worse than whether Oriental languages can be represented in the Roman
alphabet?  Naaaah ...

# My suggestion was that pragmatic considerations might be so strong
# that they override the compositional semantics and produce an
# "interpretation" that is not semantically possible.  In such a
# case, we will have to pragmatically force the (single) semantically
# possible interpretation, if we want it to appear in performance.

There are several different issues involved here, and the one *I* am
interested in is the way data is used.  Let me try again.

Both negQ and negV are *semantically* possible compositions.  The
question is how certain English sentences map onto logical
representations.  You seem to be saying that sentences of the form
"All the students don't know Spanish" is somehow essentially negV,
because of the placement of the negator.  I infer this from your
statement above that the "compositional semantics" (presumable a
negator plus a verb) has to be "overridden" to get the negQ
interpretation.

The problem with this is that the normal meaning of "all ... not" in
English is *not* negV, as the order of elements would indicate, but
negQ.  Every native speaker I have asked has confirmed this.  I find
*no one* who interprets it as negV.  The normal way to express the
negV sense would be "None of the students know(s) Spanish".  An
alternative way of expressing the negQ meaning would be "Not all the
students know Spanish".

This means that the order of negative and quantifier in English is not
a direct indication of the scope relationships that hold between them.

Another problem is that only the universal quantifiers work this way.
For instance, the normal interpretation of "Many of the students don't
know Spanish" *is* negQ; i.e., it does *not* mean "Not many of the
students know Spanish".

I raised two complaints about your claim that "all ... not" somehow
*is* negV, by definition, I suppose.

The first is that the sentence simply doesn't mean "not all".  If
you're dealing with a real language -- and I imagine you must be,
if you're talking about pragmatics -- you simply can't ignore
native speakers' understanding of the relationship between the
quantifier and the negator.

The second is that if natural languages were bound by the ordering
conventions of logical languages, so that the *true* interpretation
of "all ... not" had to be negV, which could be forced to negQ only
by pragmatic considerations, why does "all ... not" stay in the
language?  Why would speakers consistently use a construction that
meant the opposite of what they were trying to say?

# I'm stunned that you seem to want to question the claim that negV
# is pragmatically possible.  Can it happen that pragmatic factors
# would suffice for a hearer to conclude that the speaker intended
# negV?  Sure. So it's pragmatically possible.

From your previous posting:

#  > # All the semantical machinery needed for the negV reading is
#  > # independently motivated, and only negV is possible with exis-
#  > # tentials, so if either reading is merely pragmatic then
#  > # the negQ reading should be seen as merely pragmatic.

You were not claiming that negV was *possible*, but that negV was the
preferred interpretation and that negQ had to be forced by pragmatics.

I did not claim and do not claim that a semantic interpretation not
provided by the syntax and lexical items might not be forced by
pragmatics.  As I said:

#  > No, that's exactly what the question is here.  Since the first
#  > interpretation native speakers seem to get from "everybody didn't
#  > come" is negQ (= "not everybody came" = "some people didn't come"),
#  > and the negV interpretation (= "no one came") requires "forcing", if
#  > *either* interpretation is going to be "part of the language", it
#  > should be negQ.

That's why I brought up "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee".  In standard
English it is simply ungrammatical.  But in versions of English that
allow double negatives, versions most of us are fairly familiar with,
this sentence (or more probably "nobody don't like Sara Lee") would
clearly mean, without context, "Nobody likes Sara Lee".  But the
pragmatics of an advertisement (why would they say that about
themselves?) force the interpretation "(there is) nobody (who) doesn't
like Sara Lee".

But this question -- whether pragmatics can force a meaning not at
first apparent -- is not what this debate is about.  It is about this:

# The question that interests me is, is it possible that there are
# methodological considerations motivating assigning negV to
# semantics and negQ to pragmatics?  And if so, how strong are they?

This might be an interesting question about English sentences with
existential quantifiers -- in other words, are there any circumstances
under which "Many students don't know Spanish" would be interpreted as
"Not many students know Spanish".  But it's a meaningless question
with regard to sentences with universal quantifiers because the negQ
interpretation is part of the syntax. You can't possibly get reliable
data about the acceptability of sentences with quantifiers *in
general* if you mix quantifiers that behave differently in the syntax.
And you can't claim that negQ supports your conjecture about
pragmatics when it's the *normal* interpretation delivered by the
syntax.

# But the data alone won't settle the question in your favor or mine,
# since the question is how to accomodate the data in the theory.

Not if you don't know what the data are.

#  > With universals the negQ reading is not only preferred, it's the only
#  > reading most people will get without considerable strain.
#
# Agreed.  So what?  To answer this question, you gotta do some
# theory. The data alone justify your analysis no more than mine.

I haven't offered an analysis.  I'm talking about fudging the data.

#  > The fact is, existentials and universals interact
#  > differently with negation.
#
# This is your idea of a *datum*?

Yes, of course.  Why wouldn't it be?

#  > No, you simply need *two* mechanisms to account for *two*
#  > syntactic patterns.
#
# Another datum, right?

Not a datum, but certainly a basic principle of analysis.

# I think that grammatical sentences are semantically interpretable,
# and maybe a small class of ungrammatical strings as well, but there
# are plenty of radically illformed expressions that can be
# *pragmatically* "interpreted".  Do you disagree?

Of course not.  But I can't for the life of me see how this is
relevant.

# I thought we were discussing my suggestion.  In the foregoing, I've
# been defending the suggestion for the sake of discussion.  Now
# you've forgotten it?

Your suggestion was that pragmatics could force a hearer to
interpretations that were not "semantically possible" (how anyone
could have a semantically possible interpretation is beyond me -- did
you mean syntactically possible?).

My position is that the data you are using are not legitimate.  All
the theory in the world is of no use if you can't decide what it's a
theory of.

David Johns