Surprise Negation and Ethical Dative

y “Surprise Negation” (Sneg) we define a particular type of negative marker belonging to the class of “expletive negations” in the sense of Horn (2010), which does not give any contribution to the propositional meaning of the sentence (it does not reverse the polarity of the sentence, it does not license NPI, etc.). The same negative marker can indeed express a genuine negation, as in Italian; in this case, prosody disambiguates between two potentially available readings. Therefore, (1) could have a negative meaning if it is uttered with a declarative prosody (1a), or it could have an affirmative meaning if it is uttered with an interrogative/exclamative prosody (1b). (1) Ieri, non è scesa dal treno mia sorella Yesterday Sneg be.3rd sing. pres got off the train my sister a. ‘Yesterday, my sister didn’t get off the train’ b. ‘Yesterday, my sister got off the train!’