Compositionality and Complexity in Multiple Negation

This paper considers negative triggers and the interpretation of simple sentences containing more than one occurrence of those items. In the most typical interpretations those sentences have more negative expressions than negations in their semantic representation. It is first shown that this compositionality problem remains in current approaches. A principled algorithm for deriving the representation of sentences with multiple negative quantifiers in a DRT framework is then introduced. The algorithm is under the control of an on-line check-in, keeping the complexity of negation auto-embedding below a threshold of complexity. This mechanism is seen as a competence limitation imposing the ‘abrogation of compositionality’ observed in the so-called negative concord readings. A solution to the compositionality problem is thus proposed, which is based on a control on the processing input motivated by a limitation of the processing mechanism itself.