For example, would a pilot be able to manually fly the airplane and cause this kind of incident? Or would the control surfaces of the plane be able to cause this assuming that any safety limits that restrict movement were not working?
EDIT: I was also thinking about "well why should the airplane allow the pilot for such movements then?". And I think a good analogy is the brakes in your car - they do allow for maximum breaking, yet when was the last time you actually pushed it to the max?
(And note that this is 100% speculation, I just wanted to highlight that the pilot can cause such negative acceleration on their own)
Unless the aircraft was flying in a degraded state, these limits are supposed to prevent the aircraft from suffering damage during flight.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_data_inertial_reference_un...
As a parent and car pilot I used my brake once to teach my children the necessity of wearing seatbelts. You actually do not need to break hard to let them fly around I noticed.