Publication details
The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Linguistics Vanguard |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | LACINA, Radim. The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words. Linguistics Vanguard. Germany: Walter De Gryuter, 2025, vol. 11, No 1, p. 1-12. ISSN 2199-174X. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0061. |
| web | http://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0061/html |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0061 |
| Keywords | negative concord; grammaticality illusions; speeded acceptability; Czech |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Languages such as Czech exhibit negative concord, a requirement for any neg-word (e.g., 'nobody') in a clause to be accompanied by sentential negation. Theoretical treatments see this phenomenon as either a case of syntactic agreement or subsume it under negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Interestingly, in the processing of both agreement and NPIs, the inclusion of a distractor element can induce comprehenders to accept otherwise ungrammatical sentences. We tested whether such grammaticality illusions also arise with negative concord. We ran an acceptability judgement study with native speakers of Czech to see whether the inclusion of an irrelevant negated verb in a relative clause caused them to accept an ungrammatical sentence with an unlicensed neg-word. This tendency was clearly seen in the speeded acceptability judgement task (Experiment 1), but not when participants had enough time for their answers (Experiment 2), a pattern typical for linguistic illusions. Our results thus show that there is indeed an effect – the negative concord illusion. |