# Double Negation in a Negative Concord language: An experimental investigation

Viviane Déprez, Susagna Tubau, Anne Cheylus, M. Teresa Espinal

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## To cite this version:

Viviane Déprez, Susagna Tubau, Anne Cheylus, M. Teresa Espinal. Double Negation in a Negative Concord language: An experimental investigation. Lingua, 2015, 163, pp.75-107. 10.1016/j.lingua.2015.05.012. hal-01158576

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1 Double Negation in a Negative Concord Language: An Experimental Investigation

2 V. Déprez (U.Rutgers), S. Tubau (UAB), A. Cheylus (CNRS), & M.T.Espinal (UAB)

3 ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN *Lingua*.

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5 Abstract

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This paper investigates the interpretation and processing of simple transitive Catalan
sentences with multiple negative expressions experimentally. Our results provide
empirical confirmation that Negative Concord (NC) is the preferred and faster
interpretation for negative sentences that either omit or contain the overt negative marker
*no* 'not'. However, they also reveal that, in contrast to traditional descriptions of Catalan
and independently of particular favoring contexts, a non-negligible amount of Double
Negation (DN) readings arises, mainly when the negative marker co-occurs with pre-
verbal Negative Concord Items (NCIs), and when these NCIs have a complex DP
structure. Our results further suggest that two populations could be distinguished: one for
whom the negative marker is optional and leaves the favored NC reading essentially
unaffected, and another where the co-presence of *no* significantly increases DN readings.
We account for these findings within a micro-parametric approach that features
ambiguous NCIs (non-negative vs. negative) and a possible ambiguous negative marker
*no* (negative vs. expletive) variably available for Catalan speakers. The nuanced

<footnote>This work was presented at the *Going Romance 2014: Twenty-Eighth Symposium on Romance Linguistics* (Lisbon, 2014), at the *Workshop on Negation: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations* (Barcelona, 2014), at the 45th *Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages* (Campinas, 2015), and at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle-Paris7 (Paris, 2015). We are grateful to the audiences of these conferences and seminar, and to two anonymous reviewers for all their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. We acknowledge our gratitude to the students and colleagues at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona who participated in the experiments as Catalan subjects. This research has been funded by the following research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2011-23356, FFI2014-52015-P), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Centre de Linguística Teòrica (2014SGR-1013). The last author also acknowledges an ICREA Acadèmia award.</footnote>
20 empirical NC landscape that our experimental work reveals serves to stress the
21 importance of taking DN readings into consideration for a better understanding of the
22 nature of negative constructions in Catalan and cross-linguistically.

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24 **Keywords:** Negative Concord, Double Negation, experimental approach, micro-
25 parametric account, ambiguous Negative Concord Items, Catalan

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27 **1. Introduction**

28 Within the charted landscape of Negative Concord (NC) languages, Catalan is often cast
29 as a misfit because it presents the peculiarity of optionally allowing the co-presence of a
30 sentential negative marker *no* ‘not’ with pre-verbal Negative Concord Items (NCIs)<fnref n="1" />
31 (Fabra 1912, 1918, 1956; Badia i Margarit 1962, 1994; Solà 1973; Quer 1993; Vallduví
32 1994; Espinal 2000a, 2002). The central goal of the present paper is to report the results
33 of an experimental research that sought to test when, and to what extent, native speakers
34 of Catalan prefer to interpret negative sentences of various types with a single negation
35 interpretation as a Negative Concord (NC) reading, and whether, in some circumstances,
36 with specific syntactic combinations of Negative Concord Items (NCIs), with and without
37 a sentential negative marker, a Double Negation (DN) reading could emerge in simple
38 transitive clauses as it has been claimed to emerge in other NC languages like Romanian.

39 We report on two experiments that aimed at investigating the following four
40 questions. First, we tested whether it is correct, as standardly assumed by Catalan

<footnote n="1">¹ In this paper we opt to use the descriptive term Negative Concord Item (NCI) (Watanabe 2004) instead of the more frequently used term *n-word* (Laka 1990) to refer to expressions that can participate in Negative Concord constructions, sharing the semantic property of being licensed both in negative and in non-negative contexts and of appearing sometimes negative by themselves. This choice seeks to steer away from the cultural connotations that the term *n-word* has taken on in the language of North-Americans.</footnote>
grammarians, that NC is systematically and consistently the default interpretation for
sequences of multiple negative terms; second, we asked whether the processing of
negative sequences in Catalan could be overall faster, and hence presumably easier to
parse, under a NC reading than under a DN one. The latter is commonly assumed to be
cross-linguistically marked (Corblin et al. 2006, de Swart 2010, Puskás 2012), but has
recently been shown, in equivalent experimental settings, to be sometimes equally fast,
and even sometimes faster in distinct languages; third we verified whether the co-
presence of the sentential negative marker *no* with pre-verbal NCIs could influence the
readings of negative sequences and increase DN readings and fourth, we investigated
whether the morpho-syntactic nature of the NCIs involved in a negative sequence could
influence the readings preferred by native speakers, increasing or decreasing a putative
preference for a NC vs. DN reading.

Regarding the first question, we aimed at investigating to what extent the default
nature of NC readings in Catalan can be confirmed, and whether Catalan sequences of
NCIs in simple transitive clauses are essentially always unambiguous, radically favouring
NC readings in neutral discourse and prosodic contexts across native speakers, as
expected from the literature.<fnref n="2" />

Regarding the second question, we aimed to experimentally test whether speakers
process NC readings more easily and faster than DN readings, and whether the common
belief that DN readings have a higher degree of parsing complexity than NC / single
negation readings can be correlated with a longer reaction time.

Finally, regarding the third and fourth questions, our experiments were designed to
explore whether native speakers of Catalan have a preference for NC readings

<footnote n="2">² See references above.</footnote>
irrespectively of the co-presence or absence of a sentential negation marker with pre-
verbal NCIs. One of our goals in raising this precise question was to seek to establish an
experimental base line for further investigation of the properties of Catalan NC, and in
particular of the factors that can bring about the emergence of DN readings, if any. A
second goal was to provide an experimental assessment of the strength of NC
interpretations in Catalan, for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison with other
Romance languages, such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. A third goal was to
investigate the effects, if any, of the morpho-syntax of DP NCIs on the interpretation of
negative sequences. In this respect, we considered simple NCI pronominal forms vs. full
DPs (with both partitive and non-partitive forms), and their parallel vs. non-parallel
distribution in subject and object position.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents a summary of the relevant
background facts about the interpretation of negative sequences in Catalan, centring on
the properties of this language as a NC one, and on the contexts where the negative
marker *no* seems to be optional. We then present some theoretical accounts of these
known facts from the literature, focusing more specifically on the required ingredients of
a micro-parametric approach to Catalan NC. In Section 3, we present our experimental
design and methodology. Section 4 details the results of our experiments. Finally, Section
5 discusses these results and assesses their consequences within a general theory of NC.

## 2. Background

### 2.1. *Catalan as an NC language*
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*Negative doubling* (den Besten 1986), in which multiple occurrences of morphologically

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negative constituents are interpreted as a single logical negation, is a common synchronic

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phenomenon in Catalan. Characteristic Catalan examples provided in (1) contain both *n-*

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words (Laka 1990) (*ningú* ‘nobody’, *res* ‘nothing’), here referred to as NCIs (see footnote

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1) and the negative marker (*no* ‘not’):

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(1) *Ningú* (*no*) pensa *res*.

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nobody not thinks nothing

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‘Nobody is thinking anything.’

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As is well known, *no* ‘not’ is optional with NCIs in pre-verbal position but must be

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present with post-verbal ones, as the examples in (2), from Fabra (1956: 83), with an

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unaccusative predicate and a pre-verbal (2a) and post-verbal subject (2b) illustrate here:

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(2) a. *Cap d'ells* (*no*) ha vingut.

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none of them not has come

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‘None of them has come.’

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b. *(No) ha vingut cap d'ells.*

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not has come none of them

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‘None of them has come.’

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This well-known asymmetry has long fuelled the on-going debate on the status of

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Catalan NCIs as negative quantifiers (2a) or as polarity items (2b). In their ability to

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express a negative meaning alone when occurring in pre-verbal position (2a), or as

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fragment answers to questions (3), Catalan NCIs show clear similarities with English

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negative quantifiers.

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(3) A: On vas?
109 where go.2SG?

110 ‘Where do you go?’

111 B: *Enlloc*.

112 nowhere

113 ‘Nowhere.’

114 In post-verbal positions, however, Catalan NCIs have a polar behaviour (Linebarger
115 1987; Progovac 1994; Giannakidou 1998, 2000; Martins 2000), as they are sensitive to
116 the non-veridical (Zwarts 1995) property of a c-commanding licenser or of the contexts in
117 which they felicitously occur.

118 (4) a. *No* ha comprat *cap* dels llibres. (negation)

119 not has bought none of the<sub>PL</sub> books

120 ‘(S)he has not bought any of the books.’

121 b. Ha comprat *cap* dels llibres? (question)

122 has bought any of the<sub>PL</sub> books

123 ‘Has (s)he bought any of the books?’

124 c. Si ha comprat *cap* dels llibres, jo ho hauria de saber. (conditional)

125 if has bought any of the<sub>PL</sub> books I should of know

126 ‘If (s)he has bought any of the books, I should know it.’

127 According to traditional descriptive Catalan grammars, the combination of NCIs with
128 other NCIs or minimizers (Vallduví 1994) –otherwise known as *negative spread*, (with or
129 without *no*)– always leads to a single negation / NC reading and never to a cancellation of
130 negations into a positive meaning (Horn 1989), in contrast to what is usually found with
131 negative quantifiers for languages such as Standard English.
132 (5) a. *Ningú* pensa *res*. (=1b) NC

133 nobody thinks nothing

134 ‘Nobody is thinking anything.’

135 b. *Enlloc* es veu *ni* una *ànima*. NC

136 nowhere CL sees not a soul

137 (6) a. *Nobody* is thinking *nothing*. DN

138 b. *Not a soul* can be seen *nowhere*. DN

139 This contrastive interpretation of sequences of negative expressions in languages like
140 Catalan (5) vs. languages like English (6) that embodies the difference between Negative
141 Concord (NC) and Double Negation (DN) has been taken under some approaches
142 (Zeijlstra 2004 among others) to be the core factor of a parametric divide between NC
143 languages like Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, on the one hand, and DN
144 languages like Standard English, Dutch and German, on the other hand. On this view, the
145 question arises whether DN interpretations of sequences of negative expressions are ever
146 possible in NC languages, and particularly of what, if anything, can license them. In other
147 approaches to NC (de Swart and Sag 2002), NC vs. DN readings are taken to be the two
148 ambiguous faces of the same negative sentences and thus predicted to occur in all
149 languages.

150 According to traditional descriptive Catalan grammars, DN readings are only
151 possible and in fact required when two sentential negations occur in different clauses (cf.
152 the Law of Double Negation, Horn 1989), as in (7):

153 (7) *No* vull que *no* vingui.

154 not want that not come<sub>SUBJ</sub>
155 ‘I don’t want him not to come.’ (=I want him to come)

156 Yet DN is sometimes observed in single clauses under particular syntactic
157 conditions, such as for instance (8a), where an adjunct PP ambiguously allows both DN
158 and single negation/NC readings (Tubau and Espinal 2012)<fnref n="3" />. The ambiguity disappears
159 when a second *no* precedes the NCI in the PP adjunct, as in (8b).

160 (8) a. *No lluiten per res.* (DN and NC in Catalan)

161 not fight for nothing

162 ‘They don’t fight for nothing. / They don’t fight for anything.’

163 b. *No lluiten per no res.* (DN in Catalan)

164 not fight for not nothing

165 ‘They don’t fight for nothing.’

166 Otherwise, special conversational, prosodic and gestural conditions are generally
167 claimed to be necessary for DN readings to emerge, be it for sequences of multiple
168 negative terms in single clauses or with isolated NCIs. Espinal and Prieto (2011), Prieto
169 et al. (2013), and Espinal et al. (in press) experimentally investigated some of the
170 prosodic and gestural factors that favour DN in Catalan and Spanish. Regarding
171 conversational conditions more particularly, Catalan DN readings were argued to emerge
172 only in discourse contexts that allow an accessible negative proposition (or
173 presupposition) –either explicitly contained in the previous discourse, or inferred from it–
174 to be denied (Dryer 1996, Prince 1992, Geurts 1998, Espinal and Prieto 2011). In these
175 respect, Catalan is not assumed to much differ from other NC languages, where the role

<footnote n="3">³ For Tubau and Espinal (2012) this type of clause internal DN results from the presence of an abstract negative operator NEG, triggered by the NCI that checks its negative morpho-syntactic feature within this special PP construction, in combination with the overt negative marker *no*.</footnote>
176 of contextual and prosodic factors such as prosodic phrasing, stress, contrastive focus,
177 and intonation have also been highlighted as potential DN triggers (Corblin 1995, 1996;
178 and Déprez 1999, 2000 for standard French; Vinet 1998 for Québec French; Corblin and
179 Tovena 2003 for French and Italian; Molnár 1998 and Puskás 2006, 2012 for Hungarian;
180 Zanuttini 1991, 1997, Godard and Marandin 2007, and Penka 2007 for Italian; Falaus
181 2007 for Romanian; Huddlestone 2010, Biberauer and Zeijlstra 2012 for Afrikaans, see
182 also de Swart 2010). Pragmatic factors can also influence the availability of DN readings
183 is some languages. For example, a DN reading is generally favoured in the following
184 French example in (9) and also possible in other languages such as Spanish, Italian and
185 Romanian:

186 (9) a. Personne ne commet aucun peché.

187 no one NEG commits no sin

188 ‘No one commits no sin.’

189 b. Personne ne meurt jamais.

190 no one NEG dies never

191 ‘No one never dies.’

192 Comparable facts, however, do not seem to obtain readily in Catalan NCI sequences.

193 In sum, although NC readings are generally thought to be the default reading for
194 sequences of negative expressions, DN readings are also sometimes possible, but
195 generally argued to emerge only under a narrow set of circumstances not yet fully
196 understood but quite generally held to be exceptional in some ways.

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198 2.2. *The role of no*
This section focuses on the role of the sentential marker *no* ‘not’ in Catalan negative sentences. As a preliminary, note that first and foremost, the Catalan sentential negative marker *no* is the linguistic form that encodes the monadic negative operator **¬** and expresses an interpretable negative formal feature.

In sentences containing NCIs in pre-verbal positions, as noted above, *no* is always possible, but not systematically required. The source of this optionality remains unclear. On the one hand, traditional prescriptive grammars of Catalan encourage the use of *no* with pre-verbal NCIs to distinguish non-negative uses of NCIs from negative ones as in the following examples from Fabra (1912: 218), since the presence of *no* here appears to make a meaning difference.

209 (10)a. Si *mai* vinguéssiu, què farien ells?

210 if ever come<sub>SUBJ</sub> what do<sub>COND</sub> they

211 ‘If you ever came, what would they do?’

212 b. Si *mai* *no* vinguéssiu, què farien ells?

213 if ever not come<sub>SUBJ</sub> what do<sub>COND</sub> they

214 ‘If you never came, what would they do?’

215 On the other hand, descriptive grammars of contemporary Catalan claim that, if pre-
216 verbal NCIs are focalized (the capital letters stand for emphasis), then *no* is preferably
217 explicit (Espinal 2002: 2766, exs, (106b,c) and (107b,c)):<fnref n="4" />

218 (11)a. *Ningú* (*no*) ha vist *res*.

<footnote n="4">⁴ As will be clear later in the paper, it turns out that traditional and descriptive grammars of Catalan only describe one of the varieties encountered in our empirical investigation, namely the variety we will label Variety A, whose speakers mainly use polar NCIs and have a non-negative use of *no*. As explicit in our Results section, the current paper also considers the empirical facts and theoretical soundness of a different variety, Variety B, whose speakers use negative quantifiers in focalized positions and have a regressive use of non-negative *no*.</footnote>
219 nobody not has seen nothing

220 ‘Nobody has seen anything.’

221 b. NINGÚ no ha vist res.

222 nobody not has seen nothing

223 ‘Nobody has seen anything.’

224 (12)a. Enlloc (no) es veia ni una anima.

225 nowhere not CL saw not a soul

226 ‘Nowhere was a soul to be seen.’

227 b. NI UNA ÀNIMA no ha vist.

228 not a soul not has seen

229 ‘Not a soul has (s)he seen.’

230 Espinal (2002: 2767) further states that the negativity of a sentence is intensified

231 when the negative marker is explicit, (13). Moreover, she also notes that the tendency to

232 prefer an overt negative marker increases as the distance between the pre-verbal NCI and

233 the verb gets larger (14).

234 (13) De *cap* manera *no* vull que em deixis diners.

235 of no way not want that me<sub>DAT</sub> lend money

236 ‘By no means do I want you to lend me money.’

237 (14) *Cap* de les plantes que vam deixar a la banyera abans

238 none of the plants that PAST leave in the bathtub before

239 de marxar de vacances *no* sembla que s’hagi mort.

240 of leave of holidays not seem that CL.has<sub>SUBJ</sub> died
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‘None of the plants that we left in the bathtub before leaving on holidays seems to have died.’

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These facts suggest that the prosodic phrasing of the pre-verbal NCI along *no* may be of relevance in influencing its presence. Notwithstanding the precise conditions of its appearance, the sentential negative marker *no* is quite generally assumed to have no polar semantic effect on the overall interpretation of these type of sentences. In particular, *no* in such contexts is not taken to contribute an additional semantic negation.

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In sum, while prescriptive grammars recommend the use of a negative marker *no* in pre-verbal position of negative sentences generally, descriptive grammars acknowledge that native speakers hesitate on the use of *no* after pre-verbal NCIs (Solà 1973: 97, Espinal 2002: 2767). The reasons of this hesitation are not well understood, but could well reflect sociolinguistic factors, such as age, language dominance of the speaker’s area of living, and percentage of use of Catalan in daily life. According to Vallduví (1994: 273, note 8), the optionality of *no* “is a matter of register”. And indeed, the current tendency in spoken Catalan and in the media-variety is to omit the negative marker.

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Espinal (2007) interestingly observed that a comparable optionality and lack of polar semantic effect in the use of the negative sentential marker *no* is also found in other Catalan sentence types, namely in contexts of so-called expletive negation (EN). EN “refers to a pleonastic (paratactic or redundant) use of negation that does not modify the truth value of the proposition in which it appears (Jespersen 1917; Vendryes 1950; Martin 1984; Muller 1991)” (Espinal 2007: 51). Characteristic Catalan examples are given in (15), with the optional expletive negative marker in parentheses and the lexical trigger of EN in italics:

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264 (15)a. Abans que (no) arribi l'amfitrió, deixeu que em presenti.
265 before that not arrive<sub>SUBJ</sub> the.host let that me introduce<sub>SUBJ</sub>
266 'Before our host arrives, let me introduce myself.' (Espinal 2007: 50, ex. (1a))

267 b. La policia evità que (no) hi hagués un accident.
268 the police stopped that not CL had<sub>SUBJ</sub> an accident
269 'The police prevented an accident.'

270 c. Gasta més ell en tres mesos que (no) tu en tot l'any.
271 spends more he in three months that not you in whole the.year
272 'He spends more in thres months that you in a year.'
273 (Espinal 2002: 2777, ex. (136a))

274 d. Va prometre que s'esperaria fins que el seu xicot
275 PAST promise that CL.wait until that the his boyfriend
276 (no) tornés de la guerra.
277 not come.back from the war
278 'She promised to wait until her boyfriend came back from the war.'
279 (Espinal 2002: 2777, ex. (136b))

280 For Espinal (1991, 1992) and van der Wouden (1994a, 1994b), expletiveness is a
281 semantic effect that obtains in Logical Form when the semantic property of specific
282 syntactic constituents (either the negative marker no or an NCI) is absorbed by the
283 semantic contribution of another expression in the context. As illustrated in (15),
284 expletive no is licensed under non-veridical contexts, under conditions that quite parallel
285 those of polarity licensing. As Espinal suggests the expletive negation of (15) may well
286 be a type of polarity dependency comparable to the one observed in (16) with NCIs.
287 (16)a. Abans que *ningú* digui *res*, deixeu-me donar-vos la benvinguda.

288 before that nobody say<sub>SUBJ</sub> nothing let.me give.you the welcome

289 Before anyone says anything, let me welcome you.'

290 (Espinal 2007: 50, ex. (1b))

291 b. La policia *evità* que hi hagués *cap* accident.

292 the police stopped that CL had<sub>SUBJ</sub> any accident

293 ‘The police prevented that an accident.’

294 Espinal further observes that the conditions of use of the Catalan expletive *no*

295 strikingly parallel those of the optional *no* with pre-verbal NCIs. There is comparable

296 optionality, and the hesitation or register variety of use observed in the Catalan

297 population seems to cross both of these constructions equally, and presumably along the

298 same patterns. This commonality of occurrence clearly suggests that both phenomena

299 should profitably receive a parallel account. In particular both the optionality of *no*, when

300 in co-occurrence with pre-verbal NCIs, and the expletiveness of *no* in the context of

301 specific lexical triggers suggest that Catalan could manifest two homophonous distinct

302 lexical variants of *no*, one semantically negative and the other not, akin to the lexical

303 distinction found in French between the semantically negative marker *pas* and the

304 expletive negative marker *ne*. This is indeed what Espinal and Tubau (to appear) propose,

305 as is further discussed below. The existence of two distinct lexical negations is also

306 defended for Afrikaans by Biberauer (2008, 2009, 2012). Biberauer (2013) gives the

307 following list of properties distinguishing the two:

<table><thead><tr><td>Property</td><td>Nie<sub>1</sub></td><td>Nie<sub>2</sub> = expletive</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Omission → meaning change (polarity reversal)</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>Table 1. Properties to distinguish between semantically negative and expletive *nie* in Afrikaans</caption><tr><td>Modifiability</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td></tr><tr><td>Substitution by emphatic negator</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td></tr><tr><td>Stressability</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td></tr></table>

These properties, which are clearly reminiscent of those of the two distinct negation markers found in French, *pas* and *ne*, also obtain in Catalan.

In an attempt to explain away the optionality of *no*, Van der Wouden and Zwarts (1993: 216-7) were to our knowledge the first to hypothesize the existence of a dialectal variation. According to them, “there exists one dialect of Catalan that parallels French (or Afrikaans) in the sense that a doubling element *no* (that may express negation on its own) is always obligatory whenever negative elements show up in the sentence, and another dialect that behaves like Italian, with doubling only from post-verbal positions”. According to this description, in one dialect (Variety I) *no* is always obligatory, whereas in the second one (Variety II) *no* is only obligatory to license post-verbal NCIs.

However, contrary to these claims, recent work by Espinal and Tubau (2014) concluded (i) that Variety I does not exist, since there is no variety of Catalan for which *no* is always obligatory, and (ii) that Variety II does not characterize any dialect at all, since all post-verbal NCIs, PIs and minimizers, can be licensed by the negative marker, or by an NCI in pre-verbal position. We take up this issue further in our discussion section, after the results of our experiment have been presented. But first, we briefly summarize recent theoretical approaches that propose an account for this specific issue, as well as for the other properties of Catalan NC described above.
329 2.3 Theoretical background

330 The literature on NC is vast, with two main issues traditionally articulating the
discussion. One is the negative force of NCIs; the other is their quantificational status.

331 NCIs have been claimed to be universal quantifiers, both negative (Zanuttini 1991,
332 Haegeman and Zanuttini 1991, among others) and non-negative (Giannakidou 2000),
333 non-negative polarity items (Bosque 1980, Laka 1990, among others), and indefinites,
334 both negative (Suñer 1995) and non-negative (Ladusaw 1992, 1994, Zeijlstra 2004,
335 Tubau 2008, among others). Other accounts have cast NCIs as numerals of cardinality
336 zero (Déprez 1997b, 2000, and following; Espinal 2000a) with underspecified
337 quantificational force, or as items that are ambiguous between weak negative polarity
338 items and strong negative polarity items (Martins 2000), or ambiguous between polarity
339 items and negative quantifiers, either lexically (Herburger 2001) or structurally (Déprez
340 1997b, 2000, 2011a, b; Déprez and Martineau 2004). Theoretical approaches to NC are
341 always narrowly linked to the status proposed for NCIs, but as a proper review of this
342 abundant literature would take us too far afield, here we restricted our focus on the most
343 prominent recent accounts that have made a specific proposal regarding Catalan NC.
344 Before presenting the micro-parametric approach to NC recently developed in Espinal
345 and Tubau (to appear), we oppose two views, namely the macro-parametric account in
346 Zeijlstra (2004) and subsequent work, and the polyadic quantification approach of de
347 Swart and Sag (2002).
348

349

350 2.3.1. *A macro-parametric account: Zeijlstra (2004)*

351 For Zeijlstra (2004 and subsequent work) the phenomenon of NC is nothing but the
352 realization of a syntactic agreement (formalized under Chomsky's (1995) Agree
operation) between a single negative operator (which can be overt or abstract) carrying an interpretable negative formal feature, [iNeg], and one or more elements carrying an uninterpretable negative feature, [uNEG]. For him, NCIs are semantically non-negative indefinites that carry an uninterpretable negative feature [uNEG] that must be checked by an interpretable negative feature [iNEG] on a semantic negation. Zeijlstra (2004, 2008) further argues that NC languages are distinguished from DN languages by a macro-parameter that states that the former have a formal negative feature, while in the latter the negative feature has no formal status but is purely semantic. This macro-parametric variation is formalized as in (17):

(17)

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

To further distinguish among varieties of NC languages, such as Strict and Non-Strict NC languages (Giannakidou 1998), Zeijlstra assumes that negative markers can differ as negative expressions do in DN vs. NC languages, in being either semantically negative (i.e., [iNeg]) in Non-Strict NC languages, or semantically non-negative (i.e., [uNeg]) in Strict NC languages. This yields the typology in Table 2.

<table><caption>Table 2. Biberauer and Zeijlstra’s (2012) typology of NC and DN languages</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>n-words (=NCI) semantically negative</th><th>n-words (=NCI) semantically non-negative</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Negative markers semantically negative</td><td>DN languages:<br><i>Dutch, German, Swedish</i></td><td>Non-strict NC languages:<br><i>Spanish, Italian, Portuguese</i></td></tr><tr><td>Negative markers semantically non-negative</td><td><i>Afrikaans A</i></td><td>Strict NC languages:<br><i>Czech, Serbo-Croation, Greek, Afrikaans B</i></td></tr></tbody></table>

With respect to this typology, as Zeijlstra (2004) notes, Catalan appears to be a
misfit because of the optional occurrence of its negative marker, which is neither obligatory as in Strict NC languages, nor limited to co-occur with only post-verbal NCIs as in non-Strict NC languages. In an effort to reduce this Catalan misfit to the NC patterns observed elsewhere, Zeijlstra (2004) follows Van der Wouden and Zwarts (1993: 216-7) in claiming that the Catalan negation optionality flags the existence, side by side, of two distinct varieties. For him, Variety I, on the one hand, has Strict NC characterized by the obligatory presence of *no* for NCIs in all syntactic positions, in similarity with Greek and Romanian. Variety II, on the other hand, must disallow *no* with pre-verbal NCIs, as it features Non-Strict NC, in similarity with Italian and Spanish. On this view, the optionality of *no* is illusory.

Zeijlstra's approach makes very clear empirical predictions. First and foremost, it predicts that in a NC language, DN should simply not arise. Furthermore, for Catalan in particular, speakers of Variety I should find sentences lacking *no* with pre-verbal NCIs to be as ungrammatical as they are in other Strict NC languages. For speakers of Variety II, in contrast, sentences featuring a pre-verbal NCI with *no* should be ungrammatical or have a systematic DN reading, as reported for in Non-Strict NC languages. These predictions, however, do not accord with the traditional descriptions of Catalan summarized above where sentences with pre-verbal NCIs that lack *no* are considered grammatical for all speakers and where the co-presence of *no* is quite generally assumed to leave the solid NC interpretation of sentences with NCIs fully unaltered. Our experiments meant to verify these predictions.

### 2.3.2. *The polyadic quantification approach of de Swart and Sag (2002)*
In contrast to Zeijlstra (2004 and following), de Swart and Sag (2002) and de Swart (2010) take NCIs to always be negative quantifiers. For them, NC corresponds to one interpretation that is afforded by the interaction of these negative quantifiers in a polyadic quantifier framework (van Benthem 1989; Keenan and Westerståhl 1997). On this approach, there is no parametric distinction between NC and DN languages, since every sentence involving multiple negative elements can receive both a resumptive and an iterative interpretation. The first corresponds to a NC reading, the second to a DN reading. However, while NC / DN ambiguities for multiple negative constructions are well attested in French and Romanian (i.e., languages for which independent resumption analyses were respectively proposed by Déprez 1997b, 2000; Falaus 2007; and Iordăchioaia 2010), in other languages commonly exhibiting NC, no comparable systematic ambiguity has so far been reported, and DN readings are quite generally thought to only arise under restrictive and unusual contextual conditions, as discussed above for Catalan. Thus, for a resumption analysis to be able to account for cross-linguistic variations in NC, an additional mechanism must be assumed. To tackle NC typological differences, de Swart (2010) proposes to embed her resumptive analysis in a bidirectional optimality framework. Her analysis of Catalan involves the interaction of five constraints presented below:

MaxNeg: Mark the argument of a negative chain.

NegFirst: Negation is pre-verbal (Jespersen 1917, Horn 1989).

MaxSN: A negative clause must bear a marker of sentential negation.

*Neg: Avoid negation in the output. (Markedness constraint).

InterpretNeg (IntNeg): Interpret all neg expressions in the input as contributing a
417 negative meaning in the output.

418 We reproduce here the crucial OT tableaus that pertain to Catalan (de Swart 2010:173-174). The order from right to left in the tableau reflects the ranking of the constraints.

420 Note that, in the tableau in (18), it is the high ranking of the NegFirst constraint that enforces the obligatory presence a pre-verbal marker of sentential negation with post-verbal Catalan NCIs (de Swart's n-words), as in Italian, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

423 (18)

<table><caption>Tableau 9 Generation of Catalan/Brazilian Portuguese with postverbal n-word</caption><thead><tr><th>Meaning<br>¬V∃x</th><th>Form</th><th>MAXNEG</th><th>NEGFIRST</th><th>MAXSN</th><th>*NEG</th><th>INTNEG</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td></td><td>V neg</td><td></td><td>*</td><td>*</td><td>*</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>☞</td><td>sn V neg</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>**</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

424 With pre-verbal NCIs, in contrast, looking at the tableau in (19), since it is the NCI that satisfies the NegFirst constraint, the output is derived through the competition between the lower ranked constraints MaxSN and *Neg. If MaxSN and *Neg are unranked with respect to each other, as indicated here by the dotted vertical line in the tableau in (19) below, the grammar generates two optimal outputs. This is what is assumed to derive the optionality of *no* with pre-verbal NCIs described by traditional Catalan grammars.

431 (19)

<table><caption>Tableau 10 Generation of Catalan/Brazilian Portuguese with preverbal n-word</caption><thead><tr><th>Meaning<br>¬∃x<sub>1</sub>V∃x<sub>2</sub></th><th>Form</th><th>MAXNEG</th><th>NEGFIRST</th><th>MAXSN</th><th>*NEG</th><th>INTNEG</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>☞</td><td>neg V neg</td><td></td><td></td><td>*</td><td>**</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>☞</td><td>neg sn V neg</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>***</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

432 De Swart (2010) also argues that the possibility of two distinct dialects is derivable on her approach if, instead of being unranked, MaxSN and *Neg are ranked. If MaxSN dominates *Neg, then *no* will be obligatory with the input or tableau (19) as in the
437 Variety I described by Zeijlstra (2004). The reverse domination of these two constraints
438produces a dialect were *no* is disallowed again as in Zeijlstra's Variety II. We note here
439that although this approach predicts both the optionality of *no* described by traditional
440Catalan grammars and the possibility of the two dialects distinguished by Zeijslra and
441Van den Wouden, it does not, however, predict what to expect with respect to the
442distribution of DN vs. NC readings in either of the two varieties. Regarding
443interpretation, De Swart states that in her account, both dialects are NC ones with the
444ranking *Neg >> IntNeg* in the semantics, so that sentences with and without a marker of
445sentential negation are interpreted as conveying single negation under both grammars. In
446short, de Swart predicts a variety of possible grammatical outputs for Catalan, but does
447not match these distinct outputs to distinct interpretations.

448

449**2.3.3. The micro-parametric approach**

450In contrast to de Swart and Sag (2002) and de Swart (2010, and following), Déprez
451(1997b, 2000, and ff.) and Déprez and Martineau (2004) argue that the resumption
452analysis proposed in May (1990) for English negative sequences is a restricted form of
453NC that can be available only in constructions or languages in which NCIs are true
454negative quantifiers. But, importantly, Déprez argues that this type of resumptive analysis
455should not be generalized across all NC constructions or languages, since NCIs, like all
456other types of indefinite expressions can have distinct semantic and syntactic nature and,
457consequently, be subject to various interpretative and licensing conditions. Déprez
458(1997b) posits the existence side by side of two basic types of NC that form the opposite
459extremes of the cross-linguistic spectrum of possibilities, one, being a pure resumption
460type, and the other essentially equivalent to NPI licensing (non-veridical licensing). Both
types can entertain mixed and complex interactions in distinct NC constructions, within
single languages or cross-linguistically, depending on the nature of the NCIs involved in
particular negative sequences. This approach derives a non-uniform, intricate and
nuanced landscape for NC dependencies, with variations expected within and across
languages, according to the nature of the NCIs. See in particular Déprez (2011b) for a
recent development of this approach. In short, Déprez proposes to combine the semantic
ingredients of the above discussed two approaches within a micro-parametric framework
where the choice of one or the other type of NC, resumption or NPI licensing (with NPIs
of possibly distinct strength), is determined by the nature and the internal morpho-syntax
semantic mapping of the NCIs that a particular language or negative sequence
comprises.<fnref n="5" />

A specific micro-parametric approach that takes into account the possibly variable
nature of the negative elements involved in a negative sequence has independently been
developed for Catalan in the works of Espinal (2000a) and, more recently, Espinal and
Tubau (to appear). In this section we present the ingredients of this micro-parametric
approach to Catalan NC. This approach suggests that the difference between the two
varieties of Catalan presented earlier (namely Variety I and Variety II) is based on
ambiguity, not only, with respect to the nature of NCIs, but also regarding the negative
marker.

As mentioned above, to account both for the possibility of EN and the optional
occurrence of the sentential marker *no* with pre-verbal NCIs, Espinal and Tubau propose
that Catalan has two homophonous lexical variants for the sentential negative marker *no*.

<footnote n="5">⁵ More specifically, Déprez (1997a, b, 2000) and Déprez and Martineau (2004) link variation in NC to the internal structure of NCIs, arguing that the closer an NCI occurs to the edge of the constituent that contains it, for instance a DP-shell, the stronger its negative force.</footnote>
483 (20)a. *no*₁: semantic negation; formally specified [iNEG] (Zeijslra 2004, ff.).

484 b. *no*₂: expletive negation; formally specified with a strong [+σ] feature that is
485 characteristic of polar items and characterizes semantically dependent items
486 (Chierchia 2006, Labelle and Espinal 2014).<fnref n="6" />

487 Moreover, along with previous ambiguity accounts for NCIs (Déprez 2000, and ff.;
488 Martins 2000; Herburger 2001), they further propose that Catalan NCIs come in two
489 varieties as well, a dependent NCI type and a negative quantifier, each specified as
490 follows:

491 (21)a. NCI₁: polarity indefinite meaning characterized [+σ].

492 b. NCI₂: indefinite negative quantifiers meaning ṁ.

493 Espinal and Tubau (2014) additionally posit two varieties of Catalan that respectively
494 have the following distribution of negative markers and NCIs. In Variety A, where the
495 negative marker is optional with pre-verbal NCIs, NCIs are most often polarity items
496 assumed to be endowed with a semantic feature, [+σ], which induces domain-widening
497 and needs to be licensed by an appropriate semantic operator (Chierchia 2006, Labelle

<footnote n="6">⁶ A reviewer is especially interested in the semantic contribution of EN within Catalan NCI sequences in comparison to other syntactic contexts. Espinal (1992, 2000b, 2007) defends that in EN contexts (e.g. the Catalan verb *dubtar* 'to doubt', the preposition *abans* 'before') the licenser is an expression whose logical instructions force to consider a negative state of affairs, and the licensed constituent is either a negative marker of the weak type (Catalan and Spanish *no*, French *ne*) or a PI (pure PIs and NCIs). More specifically, Krifka (2010) and Delfitto (2013) defend that so-called EN is in fact negatively interpreted under the scope of German *bevor* 'before', since it yields the complement of the set of times that represents the unnegated proposition. Similarly, in Delfitto and Fiorin (2014) the authors hypothesize that the role of the negation occurring in exclamatives and rhetorical questions is to impose an order of informativity upon a hierarchical structure of accessible propositions: only when negation is high (e.g., clitic negation in Paduan) it conveys a biased interpretation and reverses the order of informativity, in such a way that the proposition that is more likely to be true is the one that is as close as possible to the top of a propositional hierarchical structure (that is, they express some sort of universal quantification). It should be pointed out, however, that EN is also common in Catalan wh-exclamatives, even though this language lacks clitic negation. In Espinal (1992, 200b, 2007) it is hypothesized that EN in any syntactic context can be analysed as a regular negative marker that can be logically absorbed when a set of lexical and structural conditions are met. At this moment, we acknowledge that different analyses of EN and various phenomena associated with EN are available in the linguistic literature, but motivating which alternative is more appropriate for the negative marker that occurs with pre-verbal NCIs in Catalan is beyond the scope of the paper.</footnote>
and Espinal 2014). Espinal and Tubau (to appear) further argue that these can participate in NC structures because they undergo a process of word syntax that allows the feature [uNeg] to merge with their root specified as [+σ]. Once [uNeg] is part of a polar NCI, it requires a licensor specified as [iNeg] to Agree with.<fnref n="7" /> Alternatively, in Variety A, NCIs may also be existential negative quantifiers, but this seems to be an emergent possibility that is less common than the use of non-negative NCIs. Finally, Variety A distinguishes two negative markers, one which is inherently negative, specified with the formal feature [iNeg], and another one which is expletive and carries also a polarity [+σ] feature (Espinal and Tubau to appear).

In Variety B, in contrast, the negative marker is fundamentally semantically negative and, hence, specified as [iNeg]; the expletive negative in this variety is basically non-existent (and hence specified as ‘regressive’ in Table 3). Furthermore, in this variety there are also two different lexical entries for NCIs, as postulated in (21), which are in competition. As negative existential quantifiers, NCIs₂ are endowed with an inherent Focus feature [uFoc], which (following Déprez 2011b) is assumed to require DP internal movement of the NCI₂ to the left periphery of the DP. Espinal and Tubau’s (2014, to appear) assumptions for Catalan NCIs and negative marker(s) are summarised in Table 3.

<table><caption>Table 3. Lexical variation in NCIs and the negative marker in Catalan</caption><thead><tr><th>Catalan</th><th>NCIs in negative contexts</th><th>Negative marker(s)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Variety A</td><td>1. [+σ]<br>2. -∃, [uFoc] (emergent)</td><td>1. [iNeg]<br>2. [+σ]</td></tr><tr><td>Variety B</td><td>1. [+σ]<br>2. -∃, [uFoc]</td><td>1. [iNeg]<br>2. [+σ] (regressive)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Having surveyed various formal accounts of Catalan we now turn to discuss our

<footnote n="7">⁷ Following Espinal and Tubau (to appear) what this means is that polar NCIs are assumed to be semantically non-negative, but syntactically active to participate in NC structures. Polar NCIs start as roots defined [+σ], and, in the course of the derivation, these roots can merge with a [uNeg] feature to build a complex item.</footnote>
517 experimental design before we consider the results of our two experiments.

518

519 **3. Methods**

520 Recall from the introduction that we designed two experiments aimed at exploring four
521 questions; first, whether NC is always the default preferred interpretation for sequences
522 of multiple negative elements in Catalan; second, whether the processing of NC is faster
523 than that of DN; third, whether the co-presence of the negative marker *no* could influence
524 the readings of NCI sequences and boost DN readings, as predicted by Zeijlstra (2004),
525 and fourth, whether morpho-syntactic conditions and syntactic order could influence the
526 emergence of DN readings. Overall, these questions can be understood as pertaining to
527 the general issue of whether semantically non-compositional NC readings have a general
528 unmarked status for the interpretation of sequences of negative expressions as compared
529 to compositional DN readings.

530 To investigate our four questions, we designed two experiments in which subjects
531 had to match a verbal stimulus with a visual one. In Experiment 1, the sentential negative
532 marker *no* was absent after pre-verbal NCIs whereas in Experiment 2 the critical items as
533 well as one of our control conditions (the control NPI condition) had the negative
534 sentential marker *no* 'not' after pre-verbal NCIs. Thus the verbal stimuli submitted to the
535 participants of the two experiments only differed in absence vs. presence of *no* 'not' in
536 the set of critical items and the NPI control condition. Speakers were asked to choose
537 between two pictures representing distinct scenes the one that best corresponded to the
538 meaning of the sentence they were presented with in written form on a computer screen.
The design was a preference test and the task a picture selection one. This section of the paper details our experimental protocol.

Section 3.1 presents the participants. Section 3.2 describes the materials used in our experimental design, as well as the structure of the design. Section 3.3 explains the procedure with which the experiment was run. Finally, Section 3.4 presents the statistical model that was used to analyse our results.

### 3.1. Participants

70 native speakers of Catalan (58 women and 12 men, aged between 19-61 with a majority between 20-23), mostly students and staff at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, participated in the two experiments. Our subjects were mostly from the Barcelona area, but some of them were from other parts of the Catalan-speaking territories. To take into consideration potential dialectal variations, speakers were asked to answer a brief sociolinguistic questionnaire at the end of the experiment. In this questionnaire, participants were asked about sex, age, place of birth and living area for the past 10 years and their daily use of Catalan. Our sample population, however, was not balanced for these factors. Answers to these questions were coded as follows:

(22)a. Regular use of Catalan in daily life: yes, no

b. Percentage of Catalan use: plus 75%, minus 75%

c. Sex: male, female

d. Age: 18-24, 25-34, more than 35

d. Birthplace: Central (CEN), Occidental (OCC), and Other (OTH)
561 d. Current living area: Central Metropolitan (CENMET), Central non-Metropolitan (CENnotMET), and Other (OTH)

562 It should be pointed out that Catalan speakers know both Catalan and Spanish, and show different degrees of dominance of the two languages. In our subject population, Catalan dominance (understood as the self-perceived amount of use of Catalan in the speaker's daily life) was reported to be over 75% for 70% of our subjects, 50-75% for 27.14% of our subjects, and between 20-50% for only 2.86%. In sum, the great majority of our participants predominantly used Catalan in their daily interactions.<fnref n="8" />

569 Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the two experiments. 35 speakers took Experiment 1 without *no* 'not' (31 women and 4 men, aged between 20-59), and 35 speakers (27 women and 8 men, aged between 19-61) took Experiment 2 with *no* 'not'.

572

573 3.2. *Materials*

574 The experimental material comprised 96 stimuli sentences matched to two pictures each subdivided into 8 conditions: 4 critical conditions, 4 control conditions and 4 different filler conditions. There were 8 token sentences for each condition, totalling 32 critical items, and 32 control items. In addition, 32 filler items were also presented. Each verbal stimulus was matched with two pictures representing scenes between which the subjects were asked to select, by mouse clicking, which one best represented the meaning of a sentence visually presented on a computer screen.

<footnote n="8">⁸ A reviewer asked whether it would have been possible to test separately Catalan speakers from those that also speak Spanish. As Spanish is part of the education system of Catalan speakers and widely present in the media, it is virtually impossible to find native speakers of Catalan with no knowledge of Spanish.</footnote>
The order of presentation of the verbal and visual stimuli was pseudo-randomized to obtain a balanced item presentation and avoid (i) ordering effects, (ii) stimuli repetition, whether visual or verbal, and (iii) left-right effects for the choice of pictures. 8 distinct lists of 8 blocks with 12 distinct stimuli sentences each were created. In each list, the order of presentation of the 8 blocks was distinct. Each block of 12 sentences was further subdivided into 4 sub-blocks each containing 3 sentences, with random ordering between 1 critical, 1 control and 1 filler sentence.

The speakers were presented with two scenes, each representing a situation that corresponded to a distinct reading of the sentence. A sample visual stimulus is given in Figure 1 for Experiment 1 (without *no*), and in Figure 2 for Experiment 2 (with *no*).

591

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Ningú canta cap de les cançons.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

592

*Figure 1.* Slide used in Experiment 1 (without *no*). The text translates literally as ‘nobody sings none of the songs’. The image on the right is true for the NC or single negation interpretation of the sentence, the one on the left represents the DN reading.

596
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

597

598

599

600

601

602

*Figure 2.* Slide used in Experiment 2 (with *no*). The text translates literally as 'nobody not sings none of the songs'. The image on the right corresponds to a NC or single negation interpretation of the sentence (i.e., 'Nobody sings any of the songs') and the one on the left to a DN reading cancelling out to a positive statement (i.e., 'Nobody doesn't sing none of the songs'; that is, Everybody sings some song).

603

604

605

606

For Figure 1 and 2, we expected speakers interpreting the target sentence as meaning 'Nobody sings any of the songs', i.e., an NC reading, to click on the right picture, and speakers interpreting it as 'Nobody sings none of the songs', i.e., an DN reading to click on the left picture.

607

608

609

610

611

612

613

The sentences used in the two experiments were organised as follows: four critical conditions, which featured sequences of two NCIs that vary in internal syntactic complexity (simple pronouns –encoded Pro– vs. full noun phrases –encoded DP–), their syntactic position (pre-verbal or post-verbal), and parallelism (same NCI type in pre-verbal and post-verbal position, distinct NCI type in both positions). This yielded the following four combinations: critical DP DP, critical Pro Pro, critical Pro DP and critical DP Pro.
Items exemplifying these four critical conditions contained the four different combinations of NCIs listed and illustrated in (23), where DP means that the NCI has both a prenominal Specifier and a noun phrase or a partitive complement, and *Pro* means that the NCI is a one-word pronominal form. Since sample sentences in Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*) only differed with respect to the presence vs. absence of the sentential negative marker *no* ‘not’, this is indicated in (23) by means of parentheses.

(23) *Critical DP DP* (parallel complex)

a. *Cap* dels alumnes (*no*) llegeix *cap* llibre.

none of the students (not) reads no book

‘None of the students reads any book.’

*Critical DP Pro* (non-parallel complex subject)

b. *Cap* dels nens (*no*) beu *res*.

none of the children (not) drinks nothing

‘None of the children drink anything.’

*Critical Pro DP* (non-parallel simple subject)

c. *Ningú* (*no*) canta *cap* de les cançons.

nobody (not) sings none of the songs

‘Nobody sings any of the songs.’

*Critical Pro Pro* (parallel simple)

d. *Ningú* (*no*) trenca *res*.

nobody (not) breaks nothing

‘Nobody breaks anything.’
The four control conditions are listed and illustrated in (24). The control DN condition was introduced to test the capacity of speakers to produce DN readings in unambiguous biclausal sentences containing two sentential negative markers. We reasoned that speakers that could not get DN readings in these unambiguous cases would not get DN readings in our critical conditions. As it turns out, one of our participants in Experiment 2 failed this control (with a 100% error) and was removed from further analysis.

The control Universal Quantifier was introduced to test the capacity of speakers to interpret sentences with universal quantifiers in subject position in combination with existential quantifiers in post-verbal position; we reasoned that DN readings can logically correspond to Universal Quantifier readings (i.e., if there is something that none of the characters in the pictures do not do, then this is something that all of them in fact do). Thus, we needed to check that participants could independently get such readings. Sentences exemplifying this control were judged as true of a pictorially represented situation where a specific action was performed by all the characters in the picture.

The control Negative Quantifier set of sentences aimed to check the capacity of native speakers to associate a single negation reading to sentences with only one pre- verbal NCI. Both Experiment 1 (with *no*) and Experiment 2 (without *no*) shared the same set of sentences.

Finally, control NPI aimed to check the interpretation associated with pre-verbal NCIs followed by an indefinite expression, without *no* 'not' in Experiment 1 and in combination with *no* 'not' in Experiment 2. Both are equally described as conveying a
659 single negation interpretation in traditional and descriptive grammars of Catalan, where
660 *no* is described as simply optional.

661 (24) *Control DN*

662 a. *No és el cas que els turistes no pesquin cap peix.*

663 not is the case that the tourists not fish no fish

664 ‘It is not the case that the tourists did not catch any fish.’

665 *Control Universal Quantifier*

666 b. *Tothom mou alguna cosa.*

667 everybody moves some thing

668 ‘Everybody moves something.’

669 *Control Negative Quantifier*

670 c. *Ningú perd les claus.*

671 nobody loses the keys

672 ‘Nobody loses the keys.’

673 *Control NPI*

674 d. *Ningú (no) neteja alguna cosa.*

675 nobody not cleans some thing

676 ‘Nobody cleans something.’

677 A set of the 32 filler sentences (four fillers per critical sentences) meant to distract
678 the participants from focusing on negative sentences. A sample of these items is given in
679 (25), with various combinations of nominal expressions in pre-verbal and post-verbal
680 position of a transitive verb: with definite or indefinite articles, demonstratives, bare
681 plurals, positive indefinite quantifiers, and a few more sentences with universal
682 quantifiers as objects.

683 (25) a. Els nens miren un programa.

684 the children watch a programme

685 ‘The children watch a programme.’

686 b. Aquests convidats beuen sucs.

687 these guests drink juices

688 ‘These guests drink juice.’

689 c. Uns turistes pesquen aquests peixos.

690 some tourists fish these fish

691 ‘Some tourists catch these fish.’

692 d. Cada home tiba una caixa.

693 every man pulls a box

694 ‘Every man pulls a box.’

695

696 3.3. *Procedure*

697 Participants were individually seated in a quiet computer room at the Universitat

698 Autònoma de Barcelona. The stimuli presentation used the Neurobehavioral Systems’

699 Presentation 17.0 software. Participants were presented with a set of instructional slides,

700 the body of the experiment, and a final sociolinguistic questionnaire on their age, sex,

701 birthplace, current place of living, and amount of Catalan use. Participants were

702 instructed to read aloud the stimulus sentences as naturally as possible, and then press the

703 space bar to display the relevant two pictures on the screen. The reading was recorded
and the stimulus sentence remained on the screen to prevent confusion.<fnref n="9" /> Picture choice was made by mouse click on the centre of the picture. Mouse trajectory and time to picture choice were measured, starting from the moment when the pictures appeared to the choice click. From time to time (approximately every 10 pictures) participants were asked to explain their choice orally responding to the question: why this choice? The experimenter listened to these responses. A total of 6,624 responses were obtained, 3,360 for Experiment 1 (32 critical + 32 controls + 32 fillers x 35 participants), and 3,264 for Experiment 2 (32 critical + 32 controls + 32 fillers x 34 participants). Each of the experiments lasted approximately between 10 and 15 minutes.

713

714 **3.4. Measures and analyses**

715 The responses were analysed using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model fit by maximum 716 likelihood (R packages lme4, Bates et al. 2014a, 2014b, and multcomp, Hothorn et al., 717 2008) with a logistic regression (logit). Picture choice was recorded with two measures: 718 mouse tracking (trajectory) from centre point, and mouse clicking (the final choice). The

<footnote n="9">⁹ The reading was recorded to allow for subsequent prosodic analysis. Note that since in our design, the presentation of stimuli sentences was visual, participants were free to produce the prosodic contour they thought best fit the interpretation they chose. It is thus expected that the prosodic realisation of NC vs. DN readings could differ as a reflection of the interpretation given by participants to the sentence stimuli. A pitch track analysis of the prosodic contour produced by our subjects could thus turn out to be particularly revealing for the question of whether interpretation correlates with prosody, since it would allow us to compare the prosody of NC choices to that of DN. At present, however, since this analysis is not completed, discussion of the prosodic realisation must be left for further research. It must be noted, however, that in our design, prosody can in no way alter the results reported here. It could reflect our participants’ choice of interpretation (and it hopefully does), but it could not be the source of it or influence it, since it was not given to our participants, but it was produced by them as a function of their chosen interpretation.</footnote>

<footnote>In addition, no information was given to the participants regarding the pragmatic setting against which the sentence could be interpreted. That is, the experiment did not contain any explicit contextual information that deliberately favoured the emergence of DN readings. Clearly, as noted by a reviewer, the fact that we provided no context does not entail that participants did not make one up for themselves. But in this respect our experimental design does not differ from any experimental setting in which speakers are asked to evaluate sentences without a context.</footnote>
719

time between picture appearance (after bar-pressing) and picture choice (by mouse clicking on the picture chosen) was also recorded.

720

721

In the next section we report our results on picture choice (NC / single negation vs. DN interpretation for our critical items, and true vs. false for the control conditions and fillers), as well as on the time that the choice took for distinct readings. A prosodic analysis of the recorded readings and a quantitative analysis of the mouse trajectory have been left for future analysis.

722

723

724

725

726

727

## 4. Results

728

In this section, we start by considering responses to our control items represented in Figure 3.

729

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

730

731

<caption>Figure 3. Percentage of error in the expected interpretation of control conditions in Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*).</caption>

732

733

Figure 3 shows the percentage of errors participants made under the control conditions described in Section 3.2 above. Considering the overall results of the two experiments together, the total percentage of errors on control items amounted to 6.88%

734

735
736 of the responses. For the Negative Quantifiers control the percentage of errors was at
737 5.10%. For the Universal Quantifier control it was 0.73% and for the Double Negation
738 control (i.e., those with the complex double proposition structure in (24a)) it was 3.18%.
739 Notably, this control was entirely failed by one of our participants (100% error), who was
740 then removed from all further analyses. Finally, for the NPI control, we note that the rate
741 was distinctly higher with 17.94% of errors.

742 This much higher error rate requires clarification. Recall that the above results put
743 together the controls for the two experiments, since in both cases, the assignment of
744 speakers to Experiment 1 (without *no*) or Experiment 2 (with *no*) was random, so that no
745 group difference was expected, and the tested items were all identical, except for the NPI
746 control. Concerning the NPI control, for Experiment 2 (with *no*), we opted to add *no* 'not'
747 to the NPI control sentences.<fnref n="10" /> This choice was guided by the following reasoning:
748 without *no* our NPI sentences, which sports a single NCI in pre-verbal position followed
749 by an indefinite in post-verbal position, like *Cap serventa trenca un gerro* (lit. no servant
750 breaks any vase), are unambiguous and only have a single negation reading. As described
751 by traditional Catalan grammars, and as is the case for our native speaker co-authors, the
752 addition of the sentential negation marker *no* to such sentences should leave their
753 meaning unaffected. On this view, then, the addition of *no* should have left the validity of
754 our unambiguous control unaffected. As it turns out, however, this was clearly not the
755 case in our experiment. Thus while in Experiment 1 (without *no*) the percentage of errors
756 on NPI control was a low 2.90%, as expected, confirming the unambiguity of such
757 sentences, it was an unexpected high 32.50% in Experiment 2 (with *no*). The addition of
758 *no* in fact strongly affected the speakers' choice, allowing a DN reading to surface from

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ This was not done for the other control items, as it was not pertinent.</footnote>
the combination of the pre-verbal NCI with the added *no* and creating an ambiguity, such that the NPI sentence type could no longer be considered a control item. Rather than errors, indeed, it turned out that our participants' choice of picture reflected a clear DN reading, where the negation of the pre-verbal NCI was cancelled by sentential *no*, contrary to the predictions drawn from traditional Catalan descriptions. We return to this important point in more detail below, where we opted to consider this condition along with our other critical conditions.

Returning to Figure 3 above, it is important to note that when the results for control NPI receive separate consideration, the overall percentage of errors drops to 3.20%. This is an overall low rate that clearly shows that the task was well understood by the participants, who had little difficulty picking the picture representing the relevant meaning of the sentences they were presented with. Even if the sentences containing NCIs had a more elevated rate of errors than the Universal Quantifier control condition, it remains low enough to validate the experimental design.

Let us now turn to considering our overall results on critical items in both Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*). Consider first Figure 4, which shows the percentage of NC vs. DN interpretation overall, all critical conditions confounded.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>
778 Figure 4. Total percentage of NC / single negation readings vs. DN readings in

779 Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*) confounded.

780 Figure 4 shows clearly that the choice for NC / single negation is undoubtedly the

781 preferred reading for simple transitive sentences with two argument NCIs in Catalan.

782 Taking into account all critical items for both experiments, 84.56% of the responses show

783 a choice for the NC reading. The comparison between NC / single negation readings vs.

784 DN readings indicate the rate of prominence of NC choice in a solid NC language.

785 Choice for a DN interpretation was, overall, 15.44% and is thus clearly the dis-preferred

786 interpretation choice. It is worth emphasising, however, that beyond this clear preference,

787 our results also indicate that DN readings are far from being entirely absent in either

788 experiment, an observation that we detail below.

789 Figure 5 shows that DN readings emerge somewhat differently in all our critical

790 conditions, which feature simple transitive sentences that contain negative expressions of

791 different syntactic complexity distributed in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions. This

792 figure again collapses the results of both Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2

793 (with *no*) together. Eyeballing Figure 5 as compared to Figure 4, it is rather clear that the

794 amount of DN in both experiments largely exceeds the amount of errors in our control

795 conditions. A Wilcoxon rank sum test shows that the overall proportion of DN is greater

796 than the proportion of errors in Fillers (p<0.001). The choice for DN, then, cannot merely

797 be attributable to errors.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. Percentage of NC / single negation interpretation and DN interpretation in critical conditions with different syntactic complexity in Experiment 1 (without *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*) confounded.</figcaption></figure>

It should be noted, however, that across both experiments, 23 of our 69 participants (4 in Experiment 2) never chose a DN reading in any and all the critical conditions plus the NPI control. Such results clearly provide overwhelming empirical support to the claims in the literature that DN is a marked interpretation for Catalan NCI sequences

When considering the results of both experiments separately, we find that in Experiment 1 (without *no*) only a small number of DN readings (6.34%) were obtained for all our critical items overall. This result does not appear to strongly differ from the rate of errors noted in our control conditions and, thus, could plausibly be attributed to mistakes. To confirm this, we conducted pairwise comparisons using a Wilcoxon rank sum test with Holm correction. The comparison of DN responses in our critical
conditions to the number of errors in the controls and fillers lead no statistically significant difference with a p=1 value.

Notably, however, the presence of the sentential negative marker *no* severely increased DN interpretations in Experiment 2 (with *no*), with the percentage of DN reading climbing to 24.29% across the four critical conditions. This figure is far too high to be attributable to error.

A GLMM analysis was run over our entire data set with perceived DN as the dependent variable. The random factors were ‘subject’ and ‘sentence’. The fixed factors were ‘Experiment’ (without *no* vs. with *no*) and ‘Condition’ (critical DP DP, critical Pro Pro, critical DP Pro, critical Pro DP). First and foremost, a massive effect of the presence of *no* was observed (p<0.001).

In Experiment 1 (without *no*), the random factor ‘Sentence’ had little effect (Variance = 0.1754), whereas the effect of the factor ‘Subject’ was higher (Variance = 3.9156). Comparing the four critical conditions with the control NPI yielded significant effects in two conditions: these were critical DP Pro (p<0.00206) and critical Pro Pro (p<0.00504).<sup>11</sup> This indicates that these are the conditions that most favoured DN readings when tested items only contained interacting NCIs but no sentential negative marker. Concerning these effects, however, it needs to be kept in mind that overall the level of DN in Experiment 1 (without *no*) is not significantly different from the level of errors in our control conditions as noted above.

<footnote n="11"><sup>11</sup> In this GLMM analysis, the control NPI was taken as the reference of comparison because it was formally the closest to the critical conditions in that the items in this control were not combined with a pre-verbal *no* in Experiment 1 (without *no*) but were in Experiment 2 (with *no*), in similarity with the critical items.</footnote>
Comparing the critical conditions among themselves by means of Tukey Contrasts
Multiple Comparisons of Means (Tukey 1953), we obtained significant effects between
critical DP Pro and critical Pro DP (p=0.0174), as well as, between critical Pro Pro and
critical Pro DP (p=0.0398). Additionally, the contrast between critical DP DP and critical
DP Pro is significant at p<0.1. This indicates an overall DN enhancing effect of DP in
pre-verbal position as compared to Pro.

For Experiment 2 (with *no*) there was little effect of the random factor ‘Sentence’
(Variance = 0.003822), as in Experiment 1 (without *no*), whereas for the factor ‘Subject’,
the effect was much higher (Variance = 4.528526). This indicates that the variation
among subjects was higher, a point we return to below when discussing subject data.
Statistical significant effects were obtained in three critical conditions when these were
compared with the control NPI: critical Pro DP (p<0.001), critical Pro Pro (p<0.001), and
critical DP Pro (p<0.001). This indicates that these are the conditions that most differed
from the control NPI in terms of how they influenced the rate of DN response. Critical
Pro DP was the condition that resulted in the least amount of DN responses, as compared
to control NPI that manifested the highest rate, followed by the critical Pro Pro condition
and the critical DP Pro condition. After NPI, the condition that most favoured DN was
DP DP, which showed no significant difference with the control NPI.

We further conducted a Tukey Contrasts Multiple Comparisons of Means (Tukey
1953) analysis to compare the four critical conditions among themselves with the aim of
finding out which one favoured a DN reading more in Experiment 2 (with *no*). The
output of this test was that the critical conditions that yielded a significant difference
were critical Pro DP as compared to the condition critical DP DP (p=0.04616). In this
case, the latter condition was the one that showed the most DN readings. This suggests
that a complex DP in pre-verbal position is a significant factor that favours DN readings.

Consider now Figures 6 and 7, which provide the results of DN readings obtained for
the critical conditions in Experiment 1 (without *no*) and in Experiment 2 (with *no*),
respectively, as compared with the NPI condition. For Experiment 1 (without *no*), the
condition that produced the most DN readings is the critical DP Pro, followed by critical
Pro Pro, critical DP DP and finally critical Pro DP. Recall, however, that the low levels of
DN in this experiment are not significantly different from error rates in the control
conditions.<sup>12</sup>

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Percentage of DN interpretation in critical conditions in Experiment 1 (without *no*) as compared to the NPI control.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="12">¹² A finer analysis (GLMM over Experiment 1 alone) showed a significant effect only when comparing the DP Pro condition and the Pro Pro condition against the control Universal Quantifier condition, which was the control in which the speakers had the least amount of error. No significant effect is obtained when comparing to the control DN or even the control Negative Quantifier.</footnote>
In Experiment 2 (with *no*) the highest rate of DN is found in the NPI control. As compared to this control, the next highest rate of DN is observed in the critical DP DP condition, followed by the critical DP Pro condition, the critical Pro Pro condition and the critical Pro DP condition. This leads an apparent effect in favor of increased DN when the subject of the transitive sequence is a DP.

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7. Percentage of DN interpretation in critical conditions in Experiment 2 (with *no*) as compared to the NPI control.</figcaption></figure>

For Experiment 2 (with *no*) a further binomial comparison was conducted to compare sequences with parallel morpho-syntactic structures, i.e., conditions that had two NCIs of the same morpho-syntactic structures (parallel), to sequences with non-parallel NCIs. Figure 8 compares the critical conditions DP DP and Pro Pro (=parallel) together to the critical conditions Pro DP and DP Pro (=non-parallel). The effects of parallelism were not found to be significant. For clarification, this comparison was conducted because it was suggested in May (1990), that parallel sequences of quantifiers may favour a resumptive quantification reading. This suggestion was not confirmed in our data,
presumably because of the otherwise DN enhancing effect of DP in pre-verbal position
(see below), which in all likelihood interfered in the above comparison.

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8. Parallelism effect in the responses to critical conditions (critical DP DP and critical Pro Pro) in Experiment 2 (with *no*).</figcaption></figure>

A further analysis was conducted to determine the effect of the complexity of the
negative expression in both pre-verbal (Figure 9) and post-verbal (Figure 10) positions.
Figure 9 reveals that the complexity of negative expressions in pre-verbal position clearly
favors DN readings. A t-test comparison reveals that the difference between conditions in
which a DP is in pre-verbal position (DP DP and DP Pro) significantly increases the rate
of DN in comparison to conditions in which Pro is in pre-verbal position (Pro DP, Pro
Pro) (p< 0.001).
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9. Complexity effects of negative expressions in pre-verbal position in Experiment 2 (with *no*).</figcaption></figure>

By contrast, the complexity of negative expressions does not matter in post-verbal position as shown in Figure 10.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Figure 10. Complexity effects of negative expressions in post-verbal position in Experiment 2 (with *no*).</figcaption></figure>
Let us finally turn to individual subject results. Figure 11 reports the percentage of DN responses per subject in the critical and NPI conditions of Experiment 2 (with *no*). This Figure reveals that 4 subjects had no DN interpretation at all, that 15 participants had between 1-10% of DN responses, 5 between 10-25% DN readings and that 11 participants had between 40 and 90% DN responses. The overall picture appears to be one in which there are essentially two populations, one (the largest) with participants hardly or infrequently responding with a DN choice and the other where the DN choice represents a clear option that cannot be ignored.

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Figure 11. Distribution of number of DN readings with respect to number of subjects in Experiment 2 (with *no*).</figcaption></figure>

A final remark is of interest concerning our subject data. Recall from the Methods section that our subjects filled up a small questionnaire at the end of their participation concerning their place of birth, current living location, age range, sex and percentage of
Catalan use in their daily life. In general, the overall population was not sufficiently balanced for any of these factors to produce a significant effect on the linguistic results. Nevertheless, one factor that had a suggestive effect nearing significance was the percentage of Catalan use in daily life. As the figure below reveals, there was overall less DN interpretation in Experiment 2 (with *no* ) for subjects that used Catalan in their daily life between 75% of the time or more. This suggests that the speakers that used Spanish more frequently in their daily lives were also the ones who tended to have more DN interpretations. But to be confirmed, such a tendency would need to be examined in an experiment with a balanced subject population.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>*Figure 12. Effect of percentage of use of Catalan on DN choice in Experiment 2* (with *no*)</figcaption></figure>
929

A final result takes into account our processing factor. Consider Figure 13.

<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>

930

931

Figure 13. Reaction time (in seconds) between display of the images and the participants' click on the chosen image.

932

933

Wilcoxon rank sum tests with Holm correction revealed significant differences between False vs. True responses in the control conditions (p<0.001). True responses were faster than False ones (on average, 3.13s for True and 4.95s for False). Significant differences were also found between DN vs. NC / single negation responses in the critical conditions (p<0.001). The Figure clearly indicates that NC / single negation responses are processed faster than DN ones (on average, 3.41s for NC and 5.35s for DN).

934

935

936

937

938
939

940 **5. Discussion**

941 In this section, we return to the four initial questions that our experiment was designed to
942 investigate concerning, first, whether, as standardly assumed by Catalan grammarians,
943 NC is systematically and consistently the default interpretation for sentences with
944 multiple NCIs; testing this possibility was important both to probe the nature of Catalan
945 NCIs with regards to whether or not they could be negative expressions, as de Swart
946 (2010), among many others, hypothesized, and to establish a baseline for further
947 manipulations. Our choice of a preference test was guided by an aspiration to find out not
948 only whether NC is indeed a default reading but also to what extent, if at all, DN readings
949 could arise as a possible interpretation of Catalan NCI sequences in monoclausal
950 transitive negative sentences. Second, to deepen this question, we further asked whether
951 NC could be easier to process than DN readings, as hypothesized by Corblin et al. (2006),
952 DN being quite generally assumed to be cross-linguistically more marked than NC (de
953 Swart 2010, Puskás 2012). Third, we explored whether the co-presence of the negative
954 marker *no* could influence the readings of NCI sequences and boost DN readings, as
955 predicted by Zeijlstra (2004) if Catalan has a variety with Non-Strict NC, such as Spanish
956 or Italian, but contrasting with the traditional description of Catalan. Finally, we sought to
957 examine whether the morpho-syntactic make-up of NCIs (DP vs. Pro) and their syntactic
958 position could influence the reading of Catalan negative sequences, favoring NC or DN
959 as was suggested to be the case for other NC languages (Italian, French) (Acquaviva
960 1995, 1997; Déprez 2000, 2011a, b). This question also aims at probing both the nature of
961 Catalan NCIs, surveying in particular whether their morpho-syntactic composition can
affect the reading they trigger in a negative NCI sequence, and the nature and stability of
the Catalan concord dependency across a variety of negative expressions.

The section is organized as follows. We begin by summarizing the experimental
results that bear on the question of the default nature of Catalan NC, and then turn to
consider what our processing results bring to this issue. We then move to considering the
DN boosting effects that the co-presence of *no* had on Catalan NCI sequences, assessing
how proposals in the literature fare in view of our experimental results. Finally, we turn
to the properties of NCIs that our results have revealed, the consideration of their effects
in influencing the interpretation of NCI sequences, and how these could be explained in
current theoretical approaches to NC.

972

## 5.1. *NC as a default reading in Catalan*

Turning to our first question on the default nature of NC readings, it is evident that first
and foremost, our results, with 84.56% NC preferred choice in both experiments
confounded, bring conclusive experimental confirmation that NC is indeed
uncontroversially the prevalent interpretation in Catalan for negative sequences of all the
types considered here, namely monoclausal transitive sentences with NCIs in both pre-
verbal and post-verbal positions with and without *no*. In this respect, our experimental
findings, which fully accord with the abundant traditional and theoretical literature on
Catalan negative dependencies (see references in the Introduction), is evidently, not
novel. It is worth noting, however, that a fully comparable experimental protocol yielded
quite different results for another presumed uncontroversial NC language, namely
French, in which Déprez (2014) found no comparable NC prevalence. Thus, our Catalan
results are not as trivial as it may appear, as they establish –for the first time, to our
knowledge– an experimental base line of how prevalent the choice of an NC
interpretation can be in an undisputable NC language, thus providing an informative basis
for further cross-linguistic comparison of NC vs. DN preference.

Just as clearly, but surely more surprisingly, our experimental results further show
that DN readings can in fact arise in simple transitive Catalan clauses, with a certain
amount of variability that depends essentially on two central factors: (i) the overt
presence of pre-verbal *no* 'not', shown to be massively significant in inducing possible
and preferred DN readings, and (ii) the complex vs. non-complex nature of NCIs and
their position, which also clearly influenced the availability of DN readings, though to a
lesser degree. We return to a more detailed discussion of the significance of each of these
factors and their combinations below.

Briefly, however, let us here comment on the rather surprising observation that DN
interpretation arose at all in simple Catalan monoclausal transitive sentences with two
NCIs, in the absence of sentential negation or any explicit favoring context (see Figure 6
for Experiment 1). This possibility evidently raises the question of where the two
conflicting semantic negations required for a DN reading could come from. Clearly, a
first semantic negation must be triggered by the presence of an NCI in pre-verbal
position, which, as is otherwise known, suffices to produce a negative sentence. The
second semantic negation, however, could just as clearly, only come from the post-verbal
NCI. As such, this appears to provide a first piece of evidence that Catalan NCIs cannot
simply always be non-negative indefinites, as they must –at least sometimes– have the
possibility of being semantically negative on their own or of triggering the presence of an
additional abstract negative operator. In Section 5.3 below, we further discuss how
exactly such a DN reading can arise in the grammar of Catalan, as several possibilities
are imaginable, including lexical variants (Herburger 2001), syntactic variants (Déprez
2000), or a difference in feature composition (Martins 2000; Labelle and Espinal 2014;
and Espinal and Tubau 2014, to appear). Here we wish only to underscore the mere
existence of these DN readings in neutral contexts, as this possibility, unexpected in a
language in which NC is clearly the default interpretation, is predicted to be excluded
from the start by traditional and descriptive grammars of Catalan and under a strict
macro-parametric approach to NC. But of course, it must be kept in mind that, if
surprising, this observation only concerns a rather small proportion of responses in
Experiment 1 (without *no*), namely only 6.34%, which although slightly larger than the
overall proportion of errors in our most challenging control, the Negative Quantifier
control (5.10%), is not statistically significantly different. In this regard, although
suggestive, this observation surely cannot constitute firm evidence that Catalan NCIs
must be negative, as these DN readings could, in principle, mostly be due to errors.
Below, however, additional evidence in support of this possibility is examined.

To sum up, although our experimental results basically uphold the overall traditional
picture of Catalan as a strongly NC language, they also paint a more nuanced picture that
is not entirely compatible with the predictions of formal syntactic approaches casting NC
as the direct consequence of a rigorous macro-parametric choice. In the upcoming
sections, we focus our discussion on exploring possible explanations for why certain
factors (i.e., the overt presence of pre-verbal *no*, the structural complexity and the
distribution of negative expressions) should matter at all in eliciting DN interpretations in
1031 Catalan, given that this language is primarily an uncontroversial NC language. We also
1032 focus on understanding what this reveals about the nature of Catalan negative
1033 dependencies. Before we turn to these points, however, we examine the impact of the
1034 processing results in our experiments, which revealed a significant difference between
1035 NC and DN.

1036

1037 5.2. *Processing NC vs. DN*

1038 As was shown in Figure 13 above, our experimental results demonstrate that Catalan
1039 speakers clearly required less time to choose a picture corresponding to a NC reading and
1040 more time to choose a picture corresponding to a DN one, in both Experiment 1 (without
1041 *no*) and Experiment 2 (with *no*) confounded. Moreover, in Experiment 1 the time to NC
1042 choice is essentially the same as the True choice for our control items, clearly suggesting
1043 that monoclausal transitive negative sentences are processed easily under an NC reading.
1044 Although the measure we recorded (time to picture choice) is not fully comparable to that
1045 of a more standard reading time, since it involves conscious choice rather than an
1046 unconscious reading speed, it nonetheless records a measure of reaction. In this regard,
1047 we conjecture that this measure can be revealing of the comprehension process that is
1048 taking place in the speaker's mind after reading the relevant sentence. Understood as
1049 such, the significant difference we found here in Catalan between NC and DN choice
1050 appears to provide strong support for Corblin's (1996) hypothesis that NC is easier to
1051 process than DN. This, along with the observation that languages featuring NC are
1052 usually more frequent in the world's cross-linguistic landscape (cf. Dryer and
1053 Haspelmath 2013) than those featuring DN, and with Bickerton's (1983) well-known
remark that NC is common to all creole languages, further appears to strengthen the
already commonly held view that NC could be universally a more natural default reading
for sequences of negative expressions than DN (de Swart 2010 among others). Should
NC turn out to be easier to process than DN quite generally, then these cross-linguistic
generalizations could perhaps even be rethought in processing terms.

However, it must be kept in mind that surprisingly little is in fact known about the
processing of either NC or DN constructions cross-linguistically. Furthermore, although
simple negative sentences are quite generally thought to take longer to process than
positive ones, recent work by Deutsch et al. (2009) shows, in contrast, that negation can
be processed unintentionally and very quickly. Similarly, an analysis of negative
dependencies in English using an experimental protocol similar to the one used in our
study shows that in English, DN readings are in fact processed faster than NC ones and
about as fast as control items (Déprez 2014). In addition, note that while Corblin's (1996)
ease of NC processing conjecture was originally offered to explain NC preferences in
French, it turns out that as Déprez (2014) shows also on the basis of experimental results
obtained in conditions fully parallel to the ones discussed here, French, in fact, manifests
no comparable speed advantage for NC over DN choices. That is, in French, contrary to
Catalan, both DN and NC choices took essentially the same time, with no statistically
significant difference between the two. Thus, ease of processing for NC seems in fact to
be language relative, with possible cross-linguistic variation, and not a fully general
characteristic of DN across languages.

Furthermore, note that if ease of processing were a general NC processing
characteristic, as conjectured by Corblin, the facts observed here, namely that DN
1077 interpretations seem sensitive to the syntactic complexity of NCIs and to their syntactic
1078 position (DP vs. Pro in pre-verbal position) would be rather unexpected. The logic of
1079 Corblin's argument indeed should lead to the reverse expectation, at least considering
1080 complexity. To see that, consider a sequence of NCIs with a certain complexity.
1081 Assuming with Corblin (1996) that speakers choose an NC reading to ease its processing,
1082 it would be expected that if the sequence is made syntactically more complex, the
1083 pressure to pick a reading easier to process should increase. Our results, however, show
1084 the opposite tendency. Increased complexity in the NCI sequence, i.e., at least the
1085 presence of DP NCIs vs. the simpler Pro in pre-verbal position, favors an increase in DN
1086 readings, not NC. Hence, what both this language-internal observation and the cross-
1087 linguistic difference between French and Catalan NC processing suggest is that ease of
1088 processing may not be a factor that generally favors NC readings, but rather it could be
1089 the processing speed that depends on the choice of NC. If so, our processing results for
1090 Catalan here can be said to uphold Corblin's (1996) hypothesis, but with a twist, namely
1091 that ease of processing could be a consequence of a grammatical or semantic pressure for
1092 NC in Catalan, and not a motivation underlying the NC choice. Note furthermore, that if
1093 NC readings had different sources cross-linguistically, i.e., if they derived from distinct
1094 semantic processes such as variable binding (NPI licensing) or resumptive quantification
1095 in different languages or in different negative sentence types (Déprez 1997 and
1096 following), then it may well be that ease of processing could characterize some of the
1097 semantic processes that derive NC, but not others. Thus, for instance, if in French, but not
1098 in Catalan, NC results from resumptive quantification (Déprez 2000, de Swart and Sag
1099 2002), then cross-linguistic variation and even language-internal variation in the
1100 processing ease of NC could be expected.

1101

1102 5.3. *The role of no: are there two NC varieties for Catalan?*

1103 In this section, we turn to what is perhaps both the most unexpected and the most
1104 interesting result of our experiments, namely the massive increase in DN readings that
1105 arose in NCI sequences in the co-presence of the sentential negation marker *no*. Although
1106 as noted above, DN readings are by and large statistically undistinguishable from errors
1107 on our controls in Experiment 1 (without *no*), this is not at all the case in Experiment 2
1108 (with *no*), where overall, a solid 24.29% of DN–highly significantly different from error
1109 rate on controls– is observed. It is, hence, clear that the increase in DN here is not due to
1110 error. In this section, we discuss possible explanations for this result, and their relation to
1111 the existence of two competing varieties for Catalan NC.

1112 Recall from Section 2.2 that in the linguistic literature, the optionality of *no* in
1113 Catalan has been related to the existence of two NC dialects (van der Wouden and Zwarts
1114 1993, Zeijlstra 2004). In these approaches, the optionality of *no* is taken to be essentially
1115 illusory as it results from the interaction of two distinct varieties, unclearly distributed in
1116 the population. According to Zeijlstra (2004), in the variety identified as Catalan I above,
1117 the presence of the sentential marker should be as obligatory as in Strict NC languages
1118 such as Greek, or Romanian, and have no effect on an unambiguous NC interpretation. In
1119 the variety identified as Catalan II, in contrast, the presence of the sentential marker
1120 should essentially be disallowed with pre-verbal NCIs, and when enforced, should lead to
1121 an obligatory DN interpretation, as in Non-Strict NC languages such as Spanish or
1122 Italian.

1123 If we focus on our sentence data, it seems clear that the overall results of our
1124 Experiment 2 (with *no*) fail to support traditional Catalan descriptions, which basically
1125 suggest the existence of a single variety where –after pre-verbal NCIs– *no* is optional and
1126 makes no contribution to the sentential meaning. As our results show, there is little doubt
1127 that the presence of *no* significantly affected the interpretation of negative sentences, as
1128 indicated by the sharp increase of DN choice.

1129 However, if instead we focus on our subject data, we observe that the effect of *no* is
1130 unevenly distributed in our population. Going back to Figure 11, note first that there are
1131 at least some speakers (actually 4) for whom the co-presence of *no* with pre-verbal NCIs
1132 makes no difference at all. These subjects simply never chose a DN reading in any of our
1133 critical condition as well as in the NPI control, which as explained above, was parallel in
1134 this regard to our critical conditions in Experiment 2. To these subjects, one could add
1135 some more speakers that produce an amount of DN that essentially hovers around the
1136 amount of errors in our control items (see the Results section). But the exact number and
1137 cut is far from clear, as it partly depends on the control items taken as referent, and the
1138 leniency adopted for inclusion in this group. Nevertheless, what is of interest in Figure 11
1139 is that overall, we observe an essentially bimodal distribution of our subjects, with a
1140 larger group of 24 speakers choosing DN between 0-25% of the time, and a smaller group
1141 of 11 speakers choosing DN almost half of the time or more.

1142 These data may indeed suggest, as hypothesized by Zeijlstra (2004) among others,
1143 that there are two varieties of Catalan, one with a largely negligible amount of DN
readings and the other for which DN readings are clearly a possible option; for this
second group of subjects, DN is chosen from 40% of the time up to almost all the time
(90%), depending on the subjects. As it turns out, however, neither of these two
populations appears to pattern in complete accordance with Zeijlstra's predictions for
Catalan. Recall from Experiment 1 (without *no*), that all speakers clearly interpreted NCI
sequences without *no* massively as NC and that they made this choice as fast as that of
correct responses to our controls. This strongly confirms the traditional grammar view
that Catalan sentences with pre-verbal NCIs and without *no* are fully acceptable for all
speakers. Hence, these data show unequivocally that there is no variety of Catalan
equivalent to a Strict NC language where the co-presence of sentential negation is
compulsory with pre-verbal NCIs. Thus, if there are indeed two varieties of Catalan, as
seems likely in view of the bimodal distribution of subjects observed, the first variety is
one in which *no* is optional and leaves the preferred NC interpretation essentially
unaffected, exactly as described by traditional Catalan grammars.

Note that for this variety, Zeijlstra's macro-parametric model is problematic. Recall
that in his typology, Strict NC languages are characterized by a semantically non-
negative ([uNeg]) sentential marker, and semantically non-negative ([uNeg]) NCIs. Yet,
for Zeijlstra's model to correctly predict the obligatory co-occurrence between NCIs and
the sentential negation marker in Strict NC languages, the latter must be the only element
able to trigger/license the presence of an abstract [iNeg] operator, so that pre-verbal NCIs
correctly fail to be able to license post-verbal ones. But this makes incorrect predictions
for his Catalan Variety I. To account for the Catalan Variety I, in which *no* is optional
and leaves the NC interpretation unaltered, there are essentially two possibilities. First,
1167 Catalan Variety I could have pre-verbal NCIs that are semantically negative (or 1168 equivalently, trigger an abstract negative operator) and a sentential negation marker that 1169 is semantically non-negative, i.e., an expletive negation. Recall from the Introduction that 1170 Espinal (2007) and Espinal and Tubau (to appear) argue that such a marker is 1171 independently needed in Catalan to account for the phenomenon of expletive negation 1172 and is essentially a strong NPI-like element. Second, pre-verbal NCIs in the Catalan 1173 Variety I could be ambiguous between semantically negative expressions able to occur 1174 alone in pre-verbal positions, and polar NCIs, requiring the co-presence of negation even 1175 when in pre-verbal subject position (i.e., a special kind of NPI expressions equivalent to, 1176 for instance, the Hindi NPI expressions in Lahiri's 1998 work). On this alternative view, 1177 positing an expletive negation is not needed, but it must be assumed that the Catalan 1178 polar NCIs can be licensed in pre-verbal positions by a negation that may fail to strictly 1179 c-command them, at least in their Spell-Out position. Several proposals along these lines 1180 have been developed, offering distinct accounts on what licenses these NPI-like 1181 expressions pre-verbally (Martins 2000; Déprez 2000, to appear; among others).<fnref n="13" /> We 1182 return to such a proposal in section 5.3 where we discuss the nature of Catalan NCIs.

1183 The second variety that Figure 11 revealed is one in which the presence of *no*
1184 significantly increases DN readings, but, in which, crucially, DN readings are not

<footnote n="13">¹³ Recall that for Martins (2000) a distinction is made between weak NPIs and strong NPIs. In order to account for the Catalan facts she must assume the following: if *no* is explicit, a weak NPI must have been selected, whereas if *no* is not overt, a strong NPI must have been selected. What exactly enforces this choice remains to be clarified.</footnote>

<footnote>In relation to this issue a reviewer raises the question of what the difference is between assuming that *no* is an expletive and assuming that *no* is a standard negative marker that does not necessarily undergo phonological realization. The semantic markedness of negation in natural languages seems quite indisputable, and so does the fact that the non-affirmative nature of the meaning (input) is reflected in the linguistic form of the output (cf. Faithfulness to negation, Hendricks et al. 2010). This notwithstanding, the semantic content of a negative marker has been argued to be submitted to a process of logical absorption when certain logical and structural conditions are met (Espinal 1992, 2000b).</footnote>
1185 obligatory, since NC remains overall the favored interpretation for negative sequences,
1186 even in Experiment 2 (with *no*). Here Zeijlstra's (2004) macro-parametric model also
1187 encounters difficulties. In this model, the presence of pre-verbal *no*, assumed to be
1188 always semantically negative in Non-Strict NC languages such as Spanish and Italian, is
1189 predicted to always yield DN. Given that Zeijlstra's Catalan II is described as Non-Strict,
1190 the existence of a group of speakers for whom DN is the only choice for pre-verbal NCIs
1191 followed by *no* is expected, but this is not what we found. For this second variety, we
1192 thus have to conclude that either a non-negative *no* is also part of this variety, but need
1193 not be used whenever it is licensed, or, alternatively, that pre-verbal polar NCI licensing
1194 by a non-c-commanding negation has become more costly.

1195 Assuming that Catalan has two lexically distinct (but homophonous) sentential
1196 negative markers *no*₁ and *no*₂ as proposed in (20) (Espinal and Tubau to appear), and two
1197 lexical variants of NCIs: *NCI*₁, which is a polar variant that can trigger an abstract
1198 negative operator, and *NCI*₂, a negative existential quantifier, as proposed in (21) (Espinal
1199 and Tubau 2014), the distinction between the two varieties we observed can be accounted
1200 for as follows. In Variety A, whenever *no* is present, speakers automatically use the
1201 expletive form whenever it is locally c-commanded by a non-veridical licensing element.
1202 This correctly predicts that only the expletive form can be used with pre-verbal NCIs, but
1203 not with post-verbal ones, since in this case, the expletive *no* would itself not be
1204 appropriately licensed. This variety appears to be characterized by a constraint that
1205 requires that only the highest potentially negative element in a chain be associated with
1206 an actual semantic negation, either overtly or covertly (characterized [iNeg]), and
1207 precludes all the following potentially negative elements in a chain to be semantically
negative ones. This is a form of Neg-first constraint, though distinct from the one proposed by de Swart (2010)<fnref n="14" />, since it concerns negative interpretation, rather than morpho-syntactic marking. For some of these speakers, we suggest that the residual small amount of DN found could presumably arise from errors or from the interaction of two (possibly negative) NCIs, as seen in Experiment 1 (without *no*) (see Figure 6), but not from the presence of *no*.

In Variety B, in contrast, the use of the expletive form of the negator is not enforced under c-command by an [iNeg] element. Speakers instead may use freely either the semantically negative sentential marker or the expletive one, with a lot of intra-speaker variability, and with the latter option being regressive and becoming less and less common.<fnref n="15" /> This accounts for the fact that the massive DN-triggering-*no*-effect observed is largely driven by this smaller group. However, here as well, Zeijlstra’s Catalan II is not strictly realized, although it seems apparent that some speakers are transitioning to it. Note that these observations provide support for the view defended in Section 2.2 that contemporary Catalan has two different lexical entries for *no*, one *no*₁ which is semantically negative, and one *no*₂ which is semantically non-negative, i.e., expletive. Recall that in this regard, Catalan appears similar to Afrikaans, for which Biberauer (2013) similarly recently concluded that a strong macro-parametric model such as the one proposed by Zeijlstra (2004, and subsequent work) made incorrect predictions.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Recall that this Optimality Theory constraint specifies that “Negation precedes the finite verb” (de Swart 2010: 96).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ It is interesting to note that in this respect, Catalan is also rather similar to Québec French in which both negative markers, *ne* and *pas* can participate in NC constructions. Strikingly, however, as observed by Daoust-Blais (1975), Muller (1991), Di Sciullo and Tremblay (1996), and Déprez and Martineau (2004), among many others, only *ne* can surface in sentences with pre-verbal NCIs, while *pas* is excluded or leads to DN readings. In recent work, Burnett and Tremblay (2014) show additionally that there is much variation in the co-occurence of *pas* with distinct types of NCIs. The subject variability that we observe here in Catalan with respect to the effect of *no* does clearly not seem to be unique to this language.</footnote>
It is therefore interesting to note in regards to the variety here distinguished, that our results suggest that there seems to be a tendency for the speakers of Variety A to be in the class of speakers that use Catalan more than 75% of the time in their daily lives, as the following table reveals.

<table><thead><tr><th>Percentage of subjects</th><th>minus 75% Catalan</th><th>plus 75% Catalan</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>%DN &gt; 25%</td><td>14.28%</td><td>17.14%</td></tr><tr><td>%DN ≤ 25%</td><td>14.28%</td><td>54.28%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Table 4. Correlation between percentage of DN readings and percentage of use of Catalan in daily life.

Observe that 54.28% of our subjects use Catalan more than 75% of the time in their daily lives and have less than 25% of DN. These are the subjects closest to what traditional grammars describe. But the cut is not as sharp as one could wish, since in this category of 75%-of-Catalan users, there are still 17.14% who chose DN between 40% to 90% of the time. To confirm the tendency here observed, a follow-up study that would properly balance the sampled population for age, use of Catalan in daily life, region and socio-economic factors would be needed. If confirmed, this would demonstrate that the Catalan speakers that deviate from the model described by traditional grammars are speakers that may be more under the influence of their second native language, namely Spanish, a textbook characteristic Non-Strict NC language.<fnref n="16" />

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ As pointed out by one reviewer, this discussion raises the following interesting cross-linguistic query: do Strict NC languages tend to allow more EN than Non-Strict NC languages? We observe that, as a Non-Strict NC language, Spanish clearly manifests a reduced use of EN as compared to Catalan (see footnote 6, above). Thus concerning Catalan Variety B (see Table 3), we do not predict full absence of EN from all contexts that usually allow it, but, crucially, diminished frequency of use as compared to the Catalan Variety A (with EN perhaps lacking altogether for only some speakers). We further observe here that along with our predictions, Greek and Romanian, two Strict NC languages, manifest an extensive use of EN in</footnote>
In sum, the complex profile of the NC and DN distribution that our results revealed is one that only partially fits the predictions of either the traditional view of Catalan or of Zeijlstra's proposed model. With respect to the use of *no*, we conclude that *no* is optional in all varieties of Catalan and there is no variety in which it is either systematically required, or systematically rejected. Yet, with respect to the existence of two NC varieties, our data indeed suggest that they are attested, and we suggest that whereas for one population an expletive *no* most often (optionally) co-occurs with pre-verbal NCIs, in another population this is a regressive option and both the negative and the expletive variants are variably allowed. Hence, the presence of *no* is increasingly associated with DN readings, as it is interpreted as semantically negative to a varying extent.

1253

1254 5.4. *The nature of Catalan NCIs*

While it is clear that the most important factor triggering potential DN readings in Catalan is the co-presence of *no* with NCIs, Experiment 2 (with *no*) also provided strong evidence that the differing morpho-syntactic nature of NCIs matters in influencing the interpretation of negative sentences and fostering DN readings. In particular, our results showed that complex NCIs, i.e., DPs with full NP complements, or partitive DPs, in contrast to simple Pronominal NCIs, have the effect of significantly raising the number of DN choices that speakers made, particularly when they occur in pre-verbal positions.

Concerning the types of negative sequences we tested, we observed specifically that in

<footnote>the canonical EN contexts. However, more thorough verification of the correlation put forward in this paper between the occurrence of a negative marker with pre-verbal NCIs and the extensive use of EN beyond NC contexts must remain a topic of future research. We would like to thank Elena Ciutescu and Ana Maria Falaus for informing about Romanian, and Artemis Alexiadou, Anastasia Giannakidou, Dimitra Lazaridou and Melita Stavrou for informing about Greek. See also Pană Dindelegan (2013) for Romanian, and Makri (2013) for EN beyond Romance.</footnote>
Experiment 2 (with *no*), our Control NPI sequences most increased the choice for DN, followed by DP DP sequences, DP Pro sequences, Pro Pro and finally Pro DP sequences (cf. Figure 7).<sup>17</sup> In this section, we examine how these results bear on what has always been a core question about NC, namely the nature of the dependent negative items that participate in it.

Before we turn to a more detailed account of the specific influence of NCI types on DN vs. NC choice, it is worth stressing here that the mere existence of such effects is unpredicted under a macro-parametric approach to NC. Clearly, a macro-parameter that regulates whether or not a language has a formal negative feature [+/- u/iNeg] has nothing to say about why certain types of NCIs can induce more DN / NC readings than others within the same language. A proper account of how the nature of NCIs can differently affect NC / DN choice requires attention to the internal micro-parametric make-up of the NCIs themselves and not just to the general nature of the dependency, as strongly advocated in Déprez's works (1997-2011). These type of data, then, demonstrate that languages are not homogeneously of NC or DN types, as expected under a macro-parametric approach, but feature, rather, NC inducing vs. DN inducing negative structures and expressions that can be similar or not across languages and that can differ or not language-internally. Thus the variation in interpretation, uncovered here, that is induced by diverse NCI types within a single language provides an important

<footnote n="17"><sup>17</sup> A reviewer noted that for him/her and other Italian speakers, sequences of NCIs with full DPs predominantly give rise to DN readings, in apparent contrast to our Catalan data, and asks why this should be so. In this regard, we first point out that in our Experiment 2 (with *no*) Critical DP DP gave rise to 28.21% of DN, higher than other NCI sequences (cf. Pro Pro in contrast). The trend does thus not seem to be absent for Catalan. Yet, before comparative conclusions could be drawn with regards to such NCI sequences in other Romance languages, it seems important to experimentally verify native speakers' interpretations, as judgements for DN readings are notoriously unstable, and the discussion of such facts in the literature is rather thin. At this point, we note that in comparable experimental settings, Déprez (2014) observed a similar increase in DN rate for French. The Italian data are also currently in the process of being investigated with the same experimental protocol.</footnote>
1282 experimental confirmation for a micro-parametric inside out approach to variation in NC,
1283 historical, cross-linguistic or language-internal (Déprez 2000, 2011b, 2014; Déprez and
1284 Martineau 2004; Labelle and Espinal 2014).

1285 Returning to the question of NCI types, recall that, by and large, four families of
1286 approaches to the nature of NCIs have been commonly distinguished in the literature. The
1287 first one considers NCIs as non-negative indefinite expressions that depend on negation
1288 (or non-veridical operators) to be licensed (Ladusaw 1992, 1994; Zeijlstra 2004; Penka
1289 2011; among others); in the second one NCIs are always negative quantifiers (Zanuttini
1290 1991, Haegeman and Zanuttini 1991, de Swart and Sag 2002, among others) and NC
1291 obtains through resumptive quantification; in the third one, NCIs are wide scope
1292 universals that outscope their licensing negation (Giannakidou 2000); and in the fourth
1293 one, NCIs are ambiguous between the first and second type (Herburger 2001). On the
1294 first and third views, NCIs are essentially dependent polar expressions that require
1295 specific contexts to be licensed. For Catalan, recall from our Introduction that in Espinal
1296 and Tubau's (2014, to appear) model, the polar variety of NCIs is characterized with a
1297 semantic strong [+σ] feature, following Chierchia's (2006) characterization of NPIs, and
1298 with a morpho-syntactic [uNeg] feature. However, Catalan NCIs cannot just be of this
1299 type, lest the DN readings that we see arising in both Experiment 1 (without *no*) and
1300 Experiment 2 (with *no*) would remain unaccounted for.<fnref n="18" /> NPIs indeed, even of the
1301 strongest type, never lead to DN readings, even in denial contexts (otherwise known to

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Puskás (2012) provides an interesting account of why DN could arise in a symmetric NC language like Hungarian under particular contextual circumstances. It is however unclear how her proposal could transpose to the cases under considerations here, particularly for Experiment 1 (without *no*) since there is no sentential negation involved. Moreover, even for Experiment 2 (with *no*), the sentences here considered are not embedded in the contexts that Puskás assumes to be necessary for a DN interpretation to arise in Hungarian.</footnote>
favor the felicity of such readings). To allow for DN readings to arise at all outside of any
particular facilitating contexts (cf. Experiment 1), it must be assumed that Catalan NCIs
can also either systematically trigger the appearance of their own abstract negative
operator, or have the ability to be semantically negative by themselves. In other words,
our results support the view that Catalan NCIs must be ambiguous, allowing both for a
non-negative polar-like variant in sentences with an NC interpretation and for a
semantically negative one to allow DN readings (cf. (21) in the Introduction section).

The idea that NCIs are ambiguous is of course not new, as it has been repeatedly
proposed in different versions at different times. Among the first to argue for such an
ambiguity was Longobardi (1987), but perhaps the best known defense of this type of
analysis is that of Herburger (2001), who argued that Spanish NCIs are lexically
ambiguous between a negative and a non-negative type, and that of Martins (2000), who
argued for a typology of polarity items in Romance based on the well-established
weak/strong distinction. Déprez (1997a, b, 1999, 2000) and Déprez and Martineau (2004)
offer yet another ambiguity proposal, arguing that NCIs can be morpho-syntactically
ambiguous, with each interpretation corresponding to a different internal morpho-
syntactic structure. In these studies, it is proposed that NCIs with negative force occupy a
high position in their nominal structure, while those that are non-negative indefinites
occupy a low DP internal position. Recently, Déprez (2011b) argued that semantically
negative NCIs occupy a (contrastive) topic/focus position within their internal DP
structure (see for instance Ticio 2005 among others for such a position in the DP) that can
either be derived via a DP-internal displacement (Kayne 2005) or be grammaticalized as
a result of historical evolution. Schematically, the morpho-syntactic distinction can be
1325 represented as follows:

1326 (26) negative NCI : [Top/Foc NCI [DP .... [NumP [NP ]]]]

1327 non-negative NCI : [Top/Foc [DP .... [NumP [NP NCI ]]]]

1328 Assuming DP to be a phase (Chomsky 2000), Déprez (2011b) proposes that the
1329 negative feature of NCIs can become accessible at the sentence level (i.e., at a higher
1330 phase level of computation) and hence semantically interpretable only if NCIs occupy the
1331 edge of their constituent, i.e., here the highest structural position in the DP in these cases.

1332 Otherwise, when buried deep inside the DP constituent, the negative feature remains
1333 uninterpretable at the sentence level, so that NCIs are interpreted as non-negative.<fnref n="19" />

1334 Yet another proposal for NCI ambiguity is offered in Labelle and Espinal (2014) and
1335 Espinal and Tubau (2014, to appear). These authors argue that NCIs can have a different
1336 feature make-up, and that it is their distinct feature composition that is responsible for
1337 their differing interpretation. One lexical variant is a polarity item (defined as [+σ]
1338 following Chierchia (2006)), which may acquire a syntactic formal feature [uNeg] in
1339 syntax that requires an Agree dependency to be established with an [iNeg] constituent;
1340 the other is a lexical variant that is a negative existential quantifier (¬∃) endowed with an
1341 uninterpretable Focus feature, [uFoc]. Such a proposal is in line with Déprez's (2011b)
1342 proposal that negative NCIs that are semantically negative occupy a Focus position
1343 within their DP structure.

1344 Arguing for a choice among these alternative proposals for the ambiguity of Catalan
1345 NCIs lies beyond the scope of this particular paper. Of relevance to our purpose here is
1346 the idea that, in Catalan, the NCIs, as well as perhaps the sentential negative marker *no*,

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ For an earlier formulation of this Feature Accessible Condition and its applicability to domains other than negation, see Déprez (1998, 2007).</footnote>
can have distinct variants that compete within the same language. Let us now turn to
consider what possibilities these assumptions offer in regards to our experimental
findings.

In comparison with Zeijlstra's (2004) macro-parametric view, the micro-parametric
approach here advocated, which takes into account the possible ambiguous make-up of
the Catalan negative marker, and of the Catalan NCIs, clearly offers more flexibility. It
predicts that Catalan should allow for at least the following possibilities. The combination
of a semantically negative sentential marker with NCIs that are semantically non-negative
evidently leads an NC reading, which is comparable to the reading obtained in polarity
dependencies. As we have seen, this is clearly a possibility in Catalan, and, perhaps, the
most common one featuring a dependency between a sentential negation and a post-
verbal NCI. To obtain this combination, we suggest that the semantically negative
version of the sentential negative marker is its default interpretation, shared by all
speakers of Catalan, in all variants. For NCIs, in contrast, we take the non-negative
variant to be the default one. Concerning the two Catalan variants discussed above, we
suggest that speakers of Variety A use the expletive *no₂* when the optional negation is c-
commanded by a negative NCI. Moreover, they only allow pre-verbal NCIs to trigger an
abstract negative operator.<fnref n="20" /> This allows for the optionality of *no* without affecting the
preferred NC reading of the sequences. Post-verbal NCIs, in turn, are licensed either like
pre-verbal ones (by an abstract negative operator triggered by a pre-verbal NCI), or by
negation.

Let us now turn to consider the variety in which DN readings are clearly a
possibility. Here we suggest that DN readings emerge from the combination of a negative

<footnote n="20">²⁰ We discuss below where this restriction may come from.</footnote>
NCI in pre-verbal position and the semantically negative sentential negation marker, accounting for the massive effect of *no* that our data have uncovered. Additionally, we conjecture that for the same type of speakers, the possibility of DN readings in NCI combinations without *no* is also allowed to emerge from the possibility of having negative existential quantifier NCIs both in pre-verbal and in post-verbal positions. Evidently, this second possibility also arises in the presence of *no*, and also leads to a DN reading. For all varieties, additionally, the presence of either a negative NCI in pre-verbal position or a negative sentential negation marker and non-negative NCIs in post-verbal position leads to the preferred NC reading that is observed overall.

Table 3, repeated here as Table 5 for convenience, summarizes the options our proposal has made available. A question that remains to be answered at this point is: when are these variants allowed or fostered?

<table><caption>Table 5. Lexical variation in NCIs and the negative marker in Catalan</caption><thead><tr><th>Catalan</th><th>NCIs in negative contexts</th><th>Negative marker(s)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Variety A</td><td>1. [+σ]<br>2. -∃, [uFoc] (emergent)</td><td>1. [iNeg]<br>2. [+σ]</td></tr><tr><td>Variety B</td><td>1. [+σ]<br>2. -∃, [uFoc]</td><td>1. [iNeg]<br>2. [+σ] (regressive)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Concerning the non-negative negation marker, it has been hypothesized in Espinal (2007) and Espinal and Tubau (2014, to appear) that speakers that have this variant of *no* also use it in so-called expletive negation constructions. This makes the clear prediction that speakers who chose a NC reading in sentences that combine two NCIs with the sentential negative marker *no* (Variety A) are also the ones who will otherwise manifest a relatively frequent use of expletive negation in the relevant constructions. Vice versa, speakers who chose a DN reading for these negative sequences (Variety B) will also lack or tend to reject expletive negative constructions. We aim to conduct further experimental
1391 work to verify this prediction.

1392 Note, however, that the two Catalan varieties uncovered in our results can also
1393 receive an alternative account that would locate their difference solely in the variable
1394 nature of their NCIs, thus possibly doing away with the contribution of an expletive
1395 negation.<fnref n="21" /> Relying on suggestions made in Déprez (to appear), such an account would go
1396 as follows. Recall that, descriptively, Catalan Variety A is a variety in which the
1397 sentential negation *no* optionally co-occurs with pre-verbal NCIs without affecting the
1398 NC interpretation. This can obtain, as discussed above, if the negative force is located in
1399 or triggered by the pre-verbal NCI and absent from the sentential negation, which is then
1400 an expletive negative dependent item. Alternatively, however, it can also logically obtain
1401 if the negative force is located in the sentential negation marker only, being then absent
1402 from the pre-verbal subject NCI. This option, however, is rarely explored in the literature,
1403 in view of the well-known fact that English-type NPIs require c-command by negation in
1404 their Spell-Out position. In turn, this type of c-command requirement, whose effect is to
1405 exclude English NPIs from pre-verbal subject positions, is commonly thought to
1406 generalize to all NPI expressions. Suppose, however, that there existed a type of negative
1407 dependent expressions for which this requirement could be relaxed. That is, suppose that
1408 for these Catalan preverbal items, c-command by negation of one of their copies –not
1409 necessarily the final Spell-Out one– could be sufficient for licensing. Given the so-called
1410 vP-Internal Subject Hypothesis (Koopman and Sportiche 1991), whereby pre-verbal
1411 subjects are derived by movement from a vP-internal position, such relaxed negative

<footnote n="21">²¹ Such an account is also suggested in Martins (2000), who proposes a feature specification for Catalan NCIs distinct from their Spanish and Italian counterparts in a feature underspecification system adapted from Rooryck (1994).</footnote>
1412 dependent expressions could occur in pre-verbal subject positions as long as overt
1413 negation c-commanded their vP-internal copy. (27) illustrates this proposal:

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>

1417 With option (27) in hand, Catalan Variety A would then be accounted for as follows.
1418 First, assuming ambiguous NCIs that either lack or have negative force, pre-verbal NCIs
1419 lacking negative force would require the co-presence of sentential negation to be
1420 licensed, but with this licensing allowed in their base position (i.e., Spec, vP for subjects
1421 or VP for objects) under a single negation reading. By contrast, the NCI with negative
1422 force would occur pre-verbally, without *no*, and, in turn, license dependent post-verbal
1423 NCIs. In Variety A, the presence of *no* would trigger the choice of the negative dependent
1424 expression lacking negative force both in subject and object position.

1425 Variety B would then differ from Variety A as follows: in Variety B, pre-verbal
1426 NCIs that lack negative force would come to disallow licensing by negation in their base
1427 position, turning into English-like NPIs that require c-command by negation in their overt
1428 derived position. That is, option (27) becomes regressive. As a consequence, gradually,
1429 only NCIs with negative force are allowed in pre-verbal position, with the co-occurrence
1430 with *no* then leading to increasing DN readings. In post-verbal position, however, NCIs
1431 that lack negative force are still properly licensed by a c-commanding negation,
1432 accounting for the growing subject-object asymmetry. On this view, as well, since the
1433 distinction in Variety B leads to a closer resemblance to the asymmetric Spanish / Italian
1434 NC type, the tendency to regard speakers of Variety B as more sensitive to the influence
1435 of Spanish remains.
Let us finally concern ourselves with the availability of DN readings with the
negative variant of NCIs. Here several possibilities can be entertained, which ultimately
depend on what the exact source of NCI ambiguity turns out to be. One interesting point
deserves further attention. Recall that our data showed that the complexity of DP
structure matters in fostering DN readings. As it turns out, most of the complex DP in our
experimental material and particularly those in pre-verbal positions were partitive DPs
(like for instance *cap dels alumnes* ‘none of the students’). In recent work on Catalan
partitive DPs, Martí i Girbau (1999) argued that these complex DPs involve DP-internal
movement (predicate inversion) to a high position in the DP structure, as shown in (28):

(28)a. molts dels llibres

many of the books

‘many of the books’

b. [DP moltsᵢ [D/PP [D/P° de [DP els [FP[NP llibres [F°[XP tᵢ ]]]]]]]]

When associated with Déprez's structural proposal on NCI ambiguity, which relates
the strength of the negative force of NCIs to a high position in DP structure, Martí i
Girbau's (1999) structure for partitives suggests an interesting explanation for the
increase in DN readings observed in our experimental results with full DPs that are
mostly partitive NCIs.<fnref n="22" /> The significant increase in DN reading observed with partitives
provides strong support for the proposal that the internal structure of NCIs matters for
their interpretation and more specifically, that their negative force correlates with the high

<footnote n="22">²² Sleeman and Kester (2002) propose an alternative analysis of partitive constructions in French without DP-internal predicate inversion. They argue for a clausal analysis in which the numeral/quantitative part of the partitive occupies a high position in the DP as in (i):</footnote>

<footnote>(i) deux proᵢ [FP tᵢ F° [PP tᵢ de P° ses amis ]]
    two of his friends</footnote>

<footnote>Given the similarity between numerals and NCIs proposed in Déprez (1997, 2000) and Espinal (2000), such an analysis naturally extends to partitive NCIs.</footnote>
1456 position of NCIs within their structure (Déprez 1997a, b, 1999, 2000, 2011b; Déprez and
1457 Martineau 2004).

1458 Note, furthermore, that, as is rather well known, subject DPs are far more often
1459 topics than object DPs (Prince 1992). If sentential DP topics are also DPs in which a DP
1460 internal (contrastive) topic/focus movement is fostered, this again hints at a plausible
1461 avenue to explain why DN readings should be particularly favored by complex DPs in
1462 pre-verbal subject positions. That is, the idea here is that the DN reading is fostered under
1463 a kind of structural parallelism between a DP occurring in a higher sentential edge
1464 position (topic/focus in Rizzi's 1997 sentential structure) and NCIs occurring in their
1465 higher edge DP-internal position, the edge position in both serving to enhance the
1466 visibility / interpretability of the negative feature in the sentential domain. Here too,
1467 further experimental verification that targets partitive NCIs and topic structure/focus
1468 structure within the DP and in the larger sentential domain is called for to solidify these
1469 novel conjectures.

1470 But independently of these particular conjectures, it is clear that what our current
1471 experiment results have shown is that the internal structure of NCIs matters for the
1472 overall interpretation of negative sentences. Note that this is exactly what a micro-
1473 parametric approach such as the one advocated in independent work (Déprez and
1474 Martineau 2004; Déprez 2011b; Espinal and Tubau to appear, 2014) predicts. We
1475 therefore conclude that the complex empirical landscape of the distribution of DN and
1476 NC interpretation that our experiment has uncovered provides solid support for a micro-
1477 parametric approach to NC. Such an approach takes into account possible lexical variants
1478 in the interpretation of the sentential negation marker but especially in the structure and
1479 interpretation of NCIs, which can vary and compete within a single language.

1480

1481 **6. Conclusion**

1482 To conclude, this paper has presented experimental work that explored the interpretation
1483 of NCI sequences in Catalan with and without the co-occurrence of the negative marker
1484 *no*. Our results have shown that the empirical landscape of these constructions is far more
1485 complex than standardly assumed in the literature. Clearly, and unsurprisingly, our results
1486 have first and foremost confirmed experimentally that NC readings are overall the
1487 favoured reading of NCIs sequences in Catalan, both with and without the co-presence of
1488 the negative marker *no*, hence establishing an experimental base line useful for further
1489 cross-linguistic experimental investigation of NC constructions. But beyond this
1490 empirical confirmation, our results have also shown that in contrast to the traditional
1491 description of Catalan, the co-presence of the negative marker *no* with pre-verbal NCIs
1492 clearly affects the interpretation of NCI sequences as it can sometimes elicit DN readings
1493 in simple sentences outside of any particular favouring contexts. Interestingly, however,
1494 such DN readings are not elicited for all our subjects. As hypothesized by Zeijlstra
1495 (2004), the existence of two variants of Catalan that co-exist in the native speaker
1496 population seems to be supported by the near bimodal distribution of DN readings we
1497 observed in our sample population. The two variants, however, did not entirely pattern as
1498 predicted under Zeijsltra's model, as Catalan clearly does not feature a variant with Strict
1499 NC, but only a variant in which the co-presence of the negative marker is indeed optional,
1500 as described by traditional Catalan grammars. For the second variant, DN readings, which
1501 are generally not obligatory, are mostly elicited by the co-presence of *no* but were also
1502 shown to increase with the particular structure of NCIs, and more specifically for
1503 complex DP NCIs such as partitive NCIs in pre-verbal position. To account for these
1504 facts, we argued for a micro-parametric approach to Catalan NC that features both a
1505 possibly ambiguous negative marker –semantically negative or expletive, the latter option
1506 being readily available for the speakers of Variety A, and regressive for the speakers of
1507 Variety B–, and ambiguous NCIs, non-negative and negative, variably available for all
1508 Catalan speakers. Alternatively, the option of licensing polar NCIs under c-command by
1509 negation of their base-merged copy, while solid in Variety A, would become regressive in
1510 Variety B, leading to a gradual ban for polar NCIs to occur in pre-verbal position. The
1511 paper further offers conjectures as to why certain types of NCI structures (complex or
1512 partitive DPs) can foster an increase in DN interpretation and why the pre-verbal position
1513 also matters. Overall, one of the central points of our experimental work is the
1514 demonstration of how crucial taking into account the elicitation of possible DN readings
1515 can be, for a better understanding of the nature of negative constructions in Catalan, and
1516 cross-linguistically. In this regard, we hope that our work will encourage the
1517 experimental exploration of the interesting variable emergence of DN readings in the
1518 cross-linguistic landscape of NC constructions.
1519

1519

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