These are three of the questions that we investigate in our project on affixation within the CRC 1629 ‘Negation in Language and beyond’ (NegLab). We look at phenomena from Standard German (using empirical methods like picture matching tasks) and its earlier stages more closely (using corpus linguistic methods). One goal is to get a better understanding of why negative expressions have a higher processing load than non-negative ones.
Especially interesting are baseless negative derived adjectives (BNDAs). Check out one of our phenomena in French on Instagram [thanks to Cecilia Poletto]:
Le monde cruel des préfixes privatifs (by etymocurieux)
Sinn und Bedeutung 30 September 2025 in Frankfurt and an associated Workshop on Negation (PhiLingNeg)
DGfS Feburary 2026 in Trier Workshop ('Arbeitsgruppe') ****“Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions – Anything new?” as part of the Annual Conference of the German Society for Linguistics organized by Carolin Reinert (Project A02) and Farbod Khouzani (Project A03)
Weiß : Neg-words: what they are and what they are not and what follows form this. Published in Evolutionary Linguistic Theory [paper]
Reinert, Weiß, Meier (submitted) Ohne Negation undenklich: Verbklassen und Adjektivmorphologie. Eine Untersuchung zur Systematik von negativen Adjektiven ohne positive Basis. Submitted for "Verbklassen", to appear as part of the series "Linguistik - Impulse und Tendenzen", de Gruyter.
2025