The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure

Abstract: 

How do speakers recover abstract logical meanings from linguistic form when those meanings are not transparently encoded on the surface? This dissertation approaches this question through the study of Negative Concord, a widespread phenomenon in which multiple negative forms correspond to a single interpreted negation. A longstanding puzzle concerns Negative Concord Items (NCIs), the elements participating in NC, which appear to be directly associated with negative meaning in some environments, but not all. I focus on novel evidence from African American English (AAE), a language whose NC system displays unusual flexibility in the conditions under which NC is licensed, creating an especially revealing empirical landscape for investigating this broader puzzle.

Existing approaches have typically rooted explanations for the apparent duality of NCIs in the special properties of NCIs themselves. I argue instead that this duality is emergent, arising through the coordination of independent constraints across multiple levels of grammatical representation. Leveraging the broader range of environments made available by AAE, I examine how components of NC behave in interaction with other grammatical phenomena, using these interactions to diagnose distinct semantic, syntactic, and morphophonological pressures contributing to apparent NCI duality. The apparent exceptionalism of NCIs disappears once the division of labor across levels of representation is properly specified.