Two negatives in Tyneside English questions: Negative concord or double negation?

In this chapter we introduce an unusual negative construction found in Tyneside English (Northeast England) where two sentential negative elements can co-occur in questions: Didn’t she not go on holiday?. We present acceptability judgement data comparing the construction to Standard English “inner” and “outer” negation and Tyneside English tag questions and argue that the phenomenon under discussion is negative concord. We provide an analysis following Zeijlstra (2004) and Tubau (2016) in which the lower negative element not can have an uninterpretable [uNEG] feature, causing it to enter into a negative concord relation with the higher n’t, which explains the variation in usage that we find in this variety.