Negative Concord or Double Negation? The case of German.

Negation is a linguistic universal, that is a pattern manifesting across the – up to the present moment – analyzed languages. In the last few years many research and experimentation about the matter has been conducted, which led to the conclusion that negation exhibits forms which can both match or mismatch across languages. Negative concord is a phenomenon whereby a non-correspondence between form and meaning occurs, i.e. where a negative marker fails to serve the meaning of a proper negation. This thesis analyses Negative Concord based on the acceptability of the latter: the project is intended to be a pilot test aimed at testing the first parameters and results, their conformity or otherwise with the expected outcomes, as a preparatory phase leading to the launch of a large-scale study. In order to test the previously mentioned, a 3x2 experimental design with an acceptability judgment task was created, verified by means of a likert scale. The participants, in the case of this thesis native speakers of German, were presented with 75 sentences between experimental items and fillers, i.e. distractors. For each of these stimuli, they were asked to indicate their acceptability on a scale from 1 to 5. Once the results had been collected, it was investigated which of these were statistically relevant. Reflecting on the aforementioned conceptualization, this thesis hence proposes to further investigate the literature on Negative Concord, focusing on its variation across varieties of German.