Chapter 2. Negative Concord in Sign Language of the Netherlands

Abstract

In a Negative Concord (NC) configuration, two negative elements co-occur in a clause but the polarity of that clause still remains negative. NC involving two manual negators has been observed in various sign languages, but relevant examples are usually presented in the context of broader investigations on negation in a particular sign language. Also, examples are not usually drawn from natural discourse. In this chapter, we offer the first comprehensive study on NC in a single sign language, namely, the Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), based entirely on corpus data. We find that NC is attested in NGT, but that it is optional and rather infrequent. First, our contribution is of a typological nature, as we distinguish different types of NC and compare our corpus-based results with those reported for other signed and spoken languages. Second, we describe in detail our “journey”, that is, our search procedure and inclusion criteria, thereby offering methodological guidelines for future endeavors.