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)
—
Reinert (upcoming): "Gradsemantik", invited lexicon entry for Wörterbuch zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online, Band: Semantik und Pragmatik, edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Turgay and Ede Zimmermann, De Gruyter Brill.
Meier, Reinert, Weiß (accepted): 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.
Reinert and Khouzani (editors): "Approaches to NPIs and their licensing conditions: Anything new?", Workshop Proceedings to appear as a Special Issue of the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.
Weiß: Unbilibanlicheru stimmo – un-präfigierte Adjektive mit besonderen Eigenschaften. In: Kozianka, Maria, Schuhmann, Roland, und Susanne Zeilfelder: „so manag uuîslîk uuord“. Studien zum Spannungsfeld von Synchronie und Diachronie. Festschrift Rosemarie Lühr. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 245-251.
Reinert and Spellerberg: "On nominal event arguments: experimental evidence for a meaning-based perspective", Proceedings of "Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 47", pp. 1-14.