Negation as involvement: Building intersubjectivity via the Hebrew lo tagid construction

Highlights

• An examination of a negation construction with an uncommon morpho-syntactic makeup.

• A comparative analysis with two similar negation structures.

• The construction is distinct by a discourse pattern of contrastive scalarity.

• Form-meaning correlations shed light on how negation may implement involvement.

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary use of a standard negation construction that has yet to be described in the literature, thereby contributing to pragmatic typology. The construction in question referred to here as the Hebrew lo tagid (NEG say.FUT.2.SG.MS) construction, consists of an optional affirmative clause or constituent and a negated prefixed verbum dicendi. Syntactically, the construction displays properties of a routinized chunk, and its verb component is semantically interpreted as a negator. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of corpus data reveal that the lo tagid construction rejects addressees' presuppositions like other negation structures. However, it tends to appear in a specialized discourse pattern of contrastive scalarity which correlates with the construction's general argumentative function of intensifying writers' stances. Examining the construction's analyzability, compositionality, and construal shows that its morpho-syntactic makeup distinctively shapes this argumentative function as an involvement strategy that triggers addressees' internal evaluations of the topic discussed. This research, then, extends previous accounts of how negation may be hearer-oriented.

Introduction

Discourse studies routinely uncover how languages provide speakers the linguistic means to perform general types of social action. For example, research on clausal and constituent negation, known as standard negation, has illustrated how negated expressions coordinate common ground by rejecting hearers' presumed presuppositions, inferences, or counterarguments (e.g. Deppermann, 2014; Givón, 2018). Notwithstanding, research in pragmatic typology has shown that cross-linguistic differences may distinctively shape the accomplishment of a general action type (Sidnell and Enfield, 2012). To contribute to this line of inquiry, the present study examines a standard negation construction that has yet to be described in the literature, to my knowledge. This construction is referred to here as the Hebrew lo tagid construction. Contrary to common negation constructions, typically featuring negators and elements under their scope, the lo tagid construction has a unique morpho-syntactic configuration in the form of (NP/CL) lo tagid/i/u (NEG say.FUT.2.SG/PL.MS/F) NP/CL. As the gloss in the parenthesis indicates, this construction consists of an optional affirmative clause or constituent and a negated prefixed verbum dicendi which is inflected in the second-person future tense form. Syntactically, the construction displays properties of a routinized chunk, i.e. the supposed complement of the speaking verb is not necessarily preceded by the complementizer ʃe- (‘that’), and semantically, the predicate is interpreted as a negator. This is demonstrated in (1).¹

The tokens in (1) illustrate that the lo tagid construction may contrast two functionally equivalent elements (1a) or introduce clauses as counterarguments (1b). Thus, it is interpreted similarly to other Hebrew negation constructions – the contrastive negation construction and the negative it-cleft construction (Bar, 2009; Shor, 2019; Zussman, 2013). Given that different configurations typically involve different meanings (‘The Principle of No Synonymy’; Goldberg, 1995: 67), the observation above gives rise to two questions:

• Is the lo tagid construction strongly associated with specific contextual features?

• Does the unique morpho-syntactic configuration of the lo tagid construction distinctively shape the general function of negation?

To tackle these questions, the paper adopts a usage-based approach to language. Since this approach grounds units of language in interaction, it is highly suitable for exploring the discursive and pragmatic features of the lo tagid construction and the influence of its syntagmatic context on function (Kemmer and Barlow, 2000). Specifically, the paper draws on a combination of two theoretical frameworks: Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 2006) and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2018), known as Interactional Construction Grammar (Imo, 2015). Despite some discrepancies between the two frameworks (see Fischer, 2015), they share many theoretical tenets. Accordingly, Interactional Construction Grammar is usage-based; it examines grammatical expressions in relation to function; and it views the basic unit of language as a holistic gestalt that encapsulates all the relevant information for its use, including pragmatic and discourse properties (Imo, 2015).

As will be discussed below based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, corpus data reveal that the lo tagid construction rejects addressees' presuppositions, like other negation structures. However, it is restricted in its discursive use – the construction is strongly associated with scalarity and specific text types, i.e. personal narratives and discussions. As will be illustrated below, this specialized discourse pattern contributes to the construction's argumentative role. By evoking a scalar ad-hoc category and rejecting an extremely low or high value which may counter writers' evaluations, the construction construes a ‘justification ordering’. Within this ordering, writers' personal experiences are placed considerably below the highest point of justification for rejecting their evaluations. In this manner, the construction intensifies writers' stances and increases their acceptability. It is further shown that the construction uniquely shapes this general argumentative function by its employment as an involvement strategy that triggers addressees' internal evaluations of the topic discussed. As will be argued below, this intersubjective meaning is not context-dependent but derives from the construction's distinct morpho-syntactic makeup. This study, then, demonstrates how a negation construction may specialize as an involvement strategy via form-meaning correlations, thereby shedding light on a feature of negation that has been largely unexplored.

The paper is structured as follows: Sections 2 Hebrew negation, 3 The VP provide important background on Hebrew negation and the grammatical and semantic properties of the VP lo tagid, respectively. Section 4 introduces the corpus and method of the study. In section 5, I discuss the contemporary usage of the lo tagid construction, with a focus on its discourse pattern, function, compositionality, analyzability, and construal. Section 6 concludes the paper.