About

Dr. Viviane Déprez is a native of Paris, France, who grew up in German-speaking Switzerland and completed her PhD in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. After graduating, she joined the Rutgers Department of Linguistics and became a research affiliate of the Cognitive Science Lab at Princeton University until 1993. She is also a member of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Sciences, the Rutgers Graduate Faculty of Psychology, and currently a member of the Lab on Language, Brain and Cognition in Lyon. Her academic background is in theoretical syntax, with research primarily focused on the structure of nominal constituents, the syntax-semantic interface of determiners, number systems, negative concord, and the interactions between questions and quantifiers. Her current research aims to understand micro-parametric variations and the relationships between semantics/pragmatics and the grammaticalization of features such as definiteness, specificity, person, number, and negation in Romance languages, Creole languages, and second language acquisition. In recent years, Dr. Déprez has developed a more experimental approach to her research, combining corpus search, psycholinguistic experiments in second language acquisition, and ERP studies in collaboration with colleagues. She is also interested in broader cognitive issues related to the evolution of language, particularly exploring potential parallels between language syntax and the motor system.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Cognitive science
• Programming language

Selected publications

• Negative Concord in Creole Languages: Commonality and Variation in the Perspective of Bickerton’s Legacy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-02-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  International audience

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• Detecting the meaning of French expletive negation ne in avant-clauses

  2025-03-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  In this article, we characterize the semantic contribution of the French negative marker ne in temporal clauses with avant 'before'. Traditionally considered semantically vacuous, ne is an example of expletive negation (EN), a negative marker that has been assumed to be null in meaning as it seems like it is not contributing to the calculation of the sentence meaning. In line with recent work that offered alternative approaches to a vacuous account of negative markers in other languages (Krifka 2010, Cépeda 2018b), we propose that EN ne plays a semantic role: it negates that Event A in the main clause holds while Event B in the avant-clause is taking place. Simply put, EN does express negation as it negates that A and B can overlap in time. We report on the preliminary results of two experimental studies designed to verify our hypothesis and show that EN does in fact have a negative semantics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negative Concord in Creole Languages: commonalities and variation in the perspective of Bickerton's legacy

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Chapitre d'ouvrage

  PublisherOA PDF

• P-stranding, evasion, and what they (might) mean for ellipsis identity

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2023-08-31

  preprintOpen access

  International audience

  PublisherOA PDF

• La négation dans les langues créoles à base lexicale française : Constantes et Variations: pour une étude mircro-comparative des langues créoles

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2021-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  International audience

  Publisher

• On the prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani 2000; Jackendoff 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation— with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan 2005; Syrett, Simon & Nisula 2014). Our results reveal that the NC readings feature a focused subject and a post-focally more compressed object, in contrast to the DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses broad implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

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• Editorial: What Are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How Do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation?

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2020-12-03 · 2 citations

  editorialOpen access

  International audience

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• The Oxford Handbook of Negation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 77 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  Abstract In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax–semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

  PublisherDOI

• Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Meaning of Quantifiers: Implications for Pragmatic Enrichment

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2019-05-15 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  One of the most experimentally studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., 99% of the objects in the domain of quantification fall under it, a conclusion that clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.

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• Valeurs sémantiques et pragmatique des pluriels créoles : Une comparaison des pluriels mauriciens et haïtiens

  Études créoles · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  En plus de la notion de pluriel qu’ils expriment, les morphèmes pluriels créoles attribuent un sens ajouté de définitude ou de spécificité aux expressions nominales qu’ils déterminent. Toutefois, les valeurs sémantiques et pragmatiques mises en jeu par ces morphèmes restent jusqu’à présent largement floues et demandent à être clarifiées pour permettre une meilleure compréhension de ce phénomène. De surcroit, on ignore encore tout sur la question de la valeur comparative de ce sens ajouté dans différentes langues. Est-il largement identique dans différents créoles ou y a-t-il des différences selon les langues, et si oui de quelle nature ? Pour commencer à aborder ces questions, cet article rapporte les résultats d’une comparaison détaillée des usages et propriétés des morphèmes pluriels dans deux créoles à base lexicale française, le créole Haïtien et le créole Mauricien. En plus de s’être appuyé sur les jugements de plusieurs locuteurs natifs, ce travail fournit une étude qualitative et quantitative de l’usage des pluriels dans un corpus comparatif des traductions créoles de l’œuvre de St Exupéry, le Petit Prince en Haïtien et en Mauricien. Cet article vise à illustrer les notions pragmatiques et sémantiques mises en jeu de façon plus empirique que théorique pour brosser un paysage détaillé des usages possibles de ces pluriels créoles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anne Cheylus

  Inserm

  39 shared

• Michel Hoen

  19 shared

• Yves Paulignan

  15 shared

• Tatjana A. Nazir

  Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives

  15 shared

• Peter Ford Dominey

  Université de Bourgogne

  14 shared

• Anne Reboul

  Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive

  12 shared

• Ludivine Dupuy

  Institut des Sciences Cognitives

  11 shared

• M. Teresa Espinal

  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

  11 shared

Labs

• Comparative and Experimental Linguistics Lab (CELL)PI