ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and form of semantic variation in specific phenomena such as negation, negative polarity and negative concord. It seems clear that the range of semantic variation must co-vary with the number of factors or parameters considered across semantic phenomena within and across languages. The goal here is not, of course, to capture some unifying cognitive principles and constraints that can capture all of the semantic variation across all languages that exist. Instead, the more modest goal here is to state and derive a number of typological generalizations that owe their character to the form of the unified system of semantic representations formulated in Chapter 3. These generalizations tell us about the formal and conceptual sources or loci of variation and are illustrated with evidence from a number of languages from all over the world. The equivalence between the formal properties and cognitive/conceptual representations of linguistic meanings uncovers certain loci of variation reflecting the formal-conceptual limiting factors in terms of which semantic variation across semantic phenomena can be discerned.
