On the interpretation of English negative quantifiers as fragment answers to negative wh-questions in the absence of a biasing context : an experimental investigation

In this paper we experimentally investigate (i) how native speakers of English interpret negative quantifiers (e.g. nobody, nothing) when used as fragment answers to negative wh-questions in the absence of a biasing context, and (ii) whether their preferences correlate to their interpretation of full sentences with a negative quantifier co-occurring with a negative marker. Despite an overall preference for double negation interpretation, in which each syntactic negation contributes independently to the semantics, our results show that speakers also allow single negation to different extents both for fragment answers and for full clauses. Results also revealed a correlation between participants' interpretation. If they interpreted fragment answers as single negation, then they also tended to interpret full clauses as single negation, and the same was true for double negation interpretations. We account for these findings by postulating the existence of two different lexical variants for English negative indefinites (a negative quantifier one, ¬∃, and a Negative Concord Item one, ∃) that can explain why both a double negation and a single negation reading are possible for our participants when interpreting full sentences. For fragments, we show that both double negation and single negation readings can obtain with either of the two lexical variants for nothing, nobody and the like in approaches to ellipsis with different degrees of strictness on syntactic identity of the fragment with the antecedent.