Negation and Contact: With Special Focus on Singapore English

The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas, such as negative raising, negative concord, and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, with probably less attention devoted to the study of negation across dialects of languages, or across contact languages. The observation of universal quantification in the scope of negation in the English spoken in Singapore, for example, is an area which has been largely under-researched in the literature, as has the rarely-reported phenomenon of negative raising in Singapore English. The present volume profiles some of the problems of negation in English and Singapore English, framed against the background of studies of negation in other contact dialects of English and pidgins/creoles, and offering a diverse range of theoretical approaches to the problems.