Experimental evidence for negativity without negation

Abstract

Approaches to negativity tags, like English neither-tags, ‘not even’-tags, and why not, differ in whether they treat the antecedent as a clause with clausal negation (e.g., Klima, 1964; Kramer and Rawlins, 2009; Brasoveanu et al., 2013) or, more broadly, one introducing a salient counterfactual proposition into the discourse (Hofmann, 2022, 2023a). This paper presents experimental evidence for the latter view, where negativity tags were rated as natural (compared to an affirmative baseline) when their antecedent was introduced without clausal negation, but in an anti-veridical embedding (e.g., It’s a lie), under neg-raising (e.g., I don’t get the feeling), or with ‘lexical indicators of irony’ (Horn, 2016, e.g., as if). The naturalness ratings also show fine-grained differences across possible licensors, suggesting additional pragmatic constraints and raising questions about the salience of the antecedent propositions.