Double negatives and intonation in Dutch

Abstract

Dutch qualifies as a double negation language, but single negation readings are found in certain environments, under conditions that are not well understood. The combination of corpus research and a production experiment carried out in this paper reveals a surprising amount of variation, and points towards a subtle interplay of lexical factors (choice of negative expression and combinations thereof), syntactic factors (word order and adjacency), and prosodic factors (pitch accent on first/second negative) in Dutch sentences with multiple negative expressions.