On the non-homogeneity of expletive negation in Greek and beyond

Tsiakmakis, Evripidis

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2024-0063

On the non-homogeneity of expletive negation in Greek and beyond

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Tsiakmakis E. On the non-homogeneity of expletive negation in Greek and beyond. Linguistics. 2025 Apr 4. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2024-0063

Abstract

Expletive negative markers, i.e., negative markers that do not reverse the truth conditions of the sentence in which they occur, have been reported to appear in a wide array of languages and in a fairly large set of syntactic environments. Previous research has shown that expletive negation is a non-homogeneous phenomenon. Focusing on Greek, I motivate two general claims related to this non-homogeneity: (i) Greek expletive negation hosts can be classified into two linguistically relevant groups, depending on whether they feature the standard negative marker dhen or the modal negative marker min. (ii) The semantic contribution of the expletive occurrences of dhen and min retains at least parts of the meaning of their respective non-expletive counterparts. After presenting some first evidence that the dichotomy of expletive negation hosts motivated by the Greek data extends to other languages, I submit the following hypothesis as a novel promising perspective in the study of expletive negation cross-linguistically: The bi-partite distinction between dhen-expletive negation hosts and min-expletive negation hosts may be cross-linguistically valid, suggesting that expletive negation hosts across languages are divided into two classes: (a) a class of expletive negation licensors that obscure the truly negative semantics of the featured negative markers, and (b) a class of modal expletive negation licensors that feature expletive negative markers corresponding to the spell-out of modal or deontic ordering sources.