The Interpretation of Expletive Negation in English: An Experimental Investigation

In this study we experimentally investigate to what extent English speakers interpret a negative marker under the scope of an expletive negation-trigger as negative or expletive. By means of a forced-choice truth-value task administered to 97 native speakers of English we expand the range of available data that informs the presence of expletive negation in English grammar. Our results not only show, in line with the existing literature, that expletive negation in English is more widespread than acknowledged in descriptive grammars, but also that a shared hierarchy of triggers seems to exist in English across data collected by means of different methodologies. Although our participants’ proportion of expletive negation interpretation displays a high degree of variability, the comparison of our results with those of Jin & Koenig’s (2000) corpus study becomes stronger if the data of participants with high and moderate proportions of expletive negation interpretations are considered.