Browsing by Author "Potgieter, Jean-Marie"

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    'n Minimalistiese analise van ekspletiewe negativering in Afrikaans
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Potgieter, Jean-Marie; Biberauer, Theresa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The aim of this thesis was to investigate expletive negation (EN) as it manifests in Afrikaans. Consider (1): (1) Wat ek nie1 alles geleer het nie2! what I not everything learned have POL “All the things I’ve learned!” Five broad contexts were identified in which EN can manifest: adversative predicate constructions (with e.g. weier (“refuse”) and twyfel (“doubt”)), adverb constructions (with e.g. skaars (“barely”) and onmoontlik (“impossible”)), conjunction constructions (with e.g. voordat (“until”) and tensy (“unless”)), negative exclamatives (NEs), and nee-constructions (“no-constructions”). It was found that these EN constructions can be divided into two broad groups: (i) constructions with adversative predicates, adverbs and conjunctions, which serve to reconcile the semantic negativity of the sentence with a syntactic negator, and (ii) NEs and nee-constructions which serve to serve specific speaker-hearer oriented (i.e. SAP-related) functions. In addition, it was investigated how 36 native speakers of Afrikaans interpret EN constructions and how grammatical they deem these constructions. It was found that the constructions with adversative predicates and adverbs were only marginally accepted, whilst NEs and nee-constructions were accepted much more readily. The acceptability or not of conjunction constructions depended on the number of negators – constructions with both nie1 and nie2 were considered much more acceptable than those with only nie2. The formal analyses of the EN constructions were done within the framework of Minimalist Syntax. According to the analysis, the EN elements in NEs and nee-constructions are the same element in the lexion as those that feature in standard negation, but they have a more specialised role (in accordance with the Superset Principle – see Caha (2009)). These EN elements are structurally higher as they fulfill speaker-hearer-oriented functions. In contrast with the negators in NEs and nee-constructions, it was found that the constructions with adversative predicates that only utilise nie2, and with nie1 subsequently being absent, can’t be associated with [neg-Pol]. These nie2 elements are rather valued as [open-Pol]. as [open-Pol] is compatible with non-veridical constructions.
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    Negative exclamatives in Afrikaans : some initial thoughts
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of Linguistics, 2017) Biberauer, Theresa; Potgieter, Jean-Marie
    We consider the to date minimally discussed phenomenon of negative exclamatives in Afrikaans. Negative exclamatives superficially seem to be negative, when they are in fact positive exclamations. These structures therefore feature so-called expletive negation. Our goal is to illustrate some aspects of the phenomenon as it manifests in Afrikaans, and to demonstrate that Afrikaans’s negative exclamatives seem well behaved when considered against a broader crosslinguistic backdrop.