The grammars of Romance languages are famous for including what is traditionally called expletive negation (EN): a negator can occur despite contributing nothing to the polarity of the proposition denoted by the clause it occurs in. This phenomenon is attested in many other languages in the world although most of the literature on this topic only mentions a few contexts that trigger EN. In this paper, we first offer a near-exhaustive list of EN-triggering contexts collected from four genetically-unrelated languages (French, Mandarin, Zarma-Sorai, and Arabic). We then analyze the meaning of all ENtriggering contexts and explain why they are able to trigger EN cross-linguistically. We suggest that EN is the result of a fossilization of cognitive pressures that are at play even in languages without “grammatically licensed” EN. We offer performance data that support this hypothesis and show that English speakers occasionally produce sentences containing EN in the same semantic contexts as in French, Mandarin, Zarma-Sorai, and Arabic. Comparing the “incorrect” English performance data, Romance grammatically licensed EN data, and EN data from other languages which might fall in between, we discuss the possible universality of the ENtriggering contexts.

中文翻译：

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否定否定的跨语言研究

罗马语言的语法以包含传统上被称为“否定性否定”（EN）的语法而闻名：尽管否定符对所出现的从句所表示的命题的极性没有任何贡献，否定符仍然可以发生。尽管有关该主题的大多数文献只提到了触发EN的少数情况，但仍然存在。在本文中，我们首先提供了从四种与遗传无关的语言（法语，普通话，Zarma-Sorai和阿拉伯语）收集的EN触发上下文的详尽列表。然后，我们分析所有ENtriggering上下文的含义，并解释为什么它们能够跨语言触发EN。我们建议EN是认知压力僵化的结果，即使在没有“语法许可” EN的语言中，认知压力也正在发挥作用。我们提供的性能数据支持该假设，并显示英语使用者偶尔会在与法语，普通话，Zarma-Sorai和阿拉伯语相同的语义环境中产生包含EN的句子。比较“不正确”的英语表现数据，罗曼史语法许可的EN数据和可能介于两者之间的其他语言的EN数据，我们讨论了触发上下文的普遍性。