Syllabus: Negation Seminar (Spring 2017)

Here is the syllabus for my seminar on negation for Spring 2017.
I would be happy to discuss the issues, if anybody is interested.
The course did not perfectly match the syllabus.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the seminar were the guest talks!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t48l8odfxrtok5v/Negation%20Course%20Syllabus.pdf?dl=0

Syllabus         Seminar: Negation                                                                            Fall 2016

Instructor:     Professor Chris Collins (cc116@nyu.edu)

Office:             10 Washington Place, Room 411

Time:              Tuesday 9:30 – 12:15

Place:              10 Washington Place, Room 103

Level:              graduate and advanced undergraduate (undergrads need permission of instructor)

This course is on the syntax and semantics of negation. Collins and Postal 2014 propose a syntactic theory of Neg Raising, building on the proposals of Postal 2005. In this course, we will review subsequent work done in the framework of CP2014. We will also compare the proposals of CP2014 with other syntactic and semantic proposals. Topics include (but are not limited to): NPIs (weak, strong, strict, non-strict), negative concord, negative inversion, split scope, negative quantifiers, quantifiers modified by negation, NEG raising, the bagel problem, non-factive know, even, bipartite negation, contrastive negation, the Klima tests and scope freezing.

Readings:       All readings are available on Dropbox.

Course Requirements:        

a.         Paper proposal (5 pages double spaced, due October 25^th)

b.         Class Presentation (during semester)

            (You will choose a paper from the negation literature to present in class.

                        You should arrange to meet with me before your presentation.)

c.         Final Paper (around 15 pages double spaced, due during last week of classes)

d.         Final Paper Presentation (due Friday December 9^th)

Guest Speakers:

October 4                    Negative Concord in English

Frances Blanchette, Center for Language Science, Penn State

October 18                  VP Deletion and NEG Raising

Pauline Jacobson, Brown University

November 1                Graham Priest, CUNY Graudate Center

November 15              Larry Horn, Yale

Schedule (topics and dates are subject to change)

Week 1:          September 6                Background: NPIs and NEG Raising in CP2014

Collins, Chris and Paul M. Postal. 2014. Classical NEG raising. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Supplementary Readings:

Horn, Laurence R. 1978. Remarks on neg-raising. In Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.) 129-220. New York: Academic Press.

Week 2:          September 13              Modifying Quantifiers

Collins, Chris. 2016. Not even. Natural Language Semantics.

Supplementary Reading:

Lasnik, Howard.  1972/1976. Analyses of Negation in English. Doctoral dissertation, MIT (reproduced by Indiana University Linguistics Club).

Week 3:          September 20              Challenges to CP2014

Collins, Chris and Paul M. Postal. 2016. Dispelling the cloud of unknowing. Ms, NYU.

Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2016. NEG-Raising does not Involve Syntactic Reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2015, eds. Thomas Brochhagen, Floris Roelofsen, & Nadine Theiler.

Supplementary Readings:

Horn, Laurence R. 2014. The cloud of unknowing. In Black book: a festschrift in honor of Frans Zwarts. Jack Hoeksema and Dicky Gilbers (eds.) 78-96. Groningen, the Netherlands: University of Groningen.

Romoli, Jacopo. 2013. A Scalar Implicature-Based Approach to NEG-Raising.

Linguistics and Philosophy 36, 291-353.

Week 4:          September 27              Klima Tests and NEG Raising

Collins, Chris and Paul M. Postal. 2016. Interclausal NEG Raising and the Scope of Negation. Ms., NYU.

Supplementary Reading:

Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. In The structure of language. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz (eds.) 246-323. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Rodney Huddleston. Chapter 9: Negation. In Rodney

Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, pgs. 785-849. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Week 5:          October 4                    Negative Concord in English

                        Guest Speaker:            Frances Blanchette

Blanchette, Frances. 2015. English negative concord, negative polarity, and double

negation. PhD Dissertation. New York: CUNY Graduate Center [Chapters 2 and 5]

                        Supplementary Reading:

Foreman, John. 2001. Negative Inversion in West Texas English. UCLA Master’s Thesis.

Week 6:          October 11                  Student Presentations

                       

Week 7:          October 18                  VP Deletion and NEG Raising

                        Guest Speaker:            Pauline Jacobson

Jacobson, Pauline. 2016. Some people think that there is NEG Raising and some don’t: NEG Raising meets ellipsis. Ms. Brown University.

Week 8:          October 25                  Typology of NPIs       (Paper Proposals Due)

Collins, Chris, Paul M. Postal and Elvis Yevudey. 2016. Negative polarity items in Ewe.

Collins, Chris and Paul M. Postal. 2016. NEG Raising and Serbo-Croation Negative Polarity Items. Ms, NYU.

Supplementary Readings:

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. N-Words and Negative Concord. In M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. 1. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Pereltsvaig, Asya. 2004. Negative Polarity Items in Russian and the ‘Bagel Problem’. In A. Przepiorkowski and S. Brown (eds.) Negation in Slavic, 153-178. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers.

Progovac, Ljiljana. 1994. Negative and Positive Polarity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University.

                        Zeijlstra, Hedde 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. Utrecht: LOT.

Week 9:          November 1               

                        Guest Speaker:            Graham Priest, CUNY Graduate Center

Priest, Graham. 1998. What is so Bad about Contradictions? The Journal of Philosophy 95, pgs. 410-426.

                       

Week 10:        November 8                Split Scope

Jacobs, Joachim. 1980. Lexical Decomposition in Montague-Grammar. Theoretical Linguistics 7, pgs. 121-136.

Supplementary Readings:

Penka, Doris. 2012. Split Scope of Negative Indefinites. Language and Lingusitics Compass 6/8, pgs. 517-532.

Week 11:        November 15

                        Guest Speaker:            Larry Horn

Week 12:        November 22              (open)

Week 13:        November 29              (open)

Week 14:        December 6                 Student Presenations

Week 15:        December 13   No Class         (Legislative day, Monday schedule)