The Clash of Negation and Imperatives through the lense of Cyclic Optimization

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Paula Fenger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

It has been noted in the literature that many languages are not able to form a prohibitive by combining the imperative with the basic clausal negation. Instead they require a repair, leading to various constructions expressing the same meaning. The existing theoretical analyses focus on a couple of repair strategies across a small set of languages. However, in the typological literature a much wider range of repairs for this ban has been reported, but clear generalizations are not yet available. In this project the aim is to bridge the gap between the typological and the theoretical literature. The goals of the project are two-fold: On the one hand, a systematic database of imperatives and prohibitis will be built, taking into account variation across and within different language families, and developing diagnostics to determine when and what repair will be chosen in a given language. On the other hand, a theory will be developed, that will be cyclic, and will hypothesize that all variation in repair structures comes from variation of the strength of heads in the clausal spine.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5175: Cyclic Optimization