<i>N</i>‐Words and Negative Concord

Giannakidou, Anastasia

doi:10.1002/9780470996591.ch45

Cited by 230 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…5 Important evidence for the negative concord approach comes from the ability of some Zulu [−A] nominals to appear in fragment answers, and from the fact that they can be modified by cishe-'almost' (see (10)). 6 These are among the defining properties of negative concord items, also known as n-words, and points of contrast with other kinds of NPIs including the broad NPIs of English (see, among others, Giannakidou 2006). 'Who did you see?'…”

Section: -Children [Intended: I Saw Children]mentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative concord and nominal licensing in Xhosa and Zulu

Carstens

Mletshe

2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Xhosa and Zulu nominals have restricted distributions when lacking an outer class prefix known as the augment. We argue that in negative contexts augmentless ([−A]) nominals bear negative concord features, uNeg, which must Agree with a negative licenser iNeg (Zeijlstra 2004). This accounts for the fact that some of them can be used as negative sentence fragment answers, and at the same time cannot appear in sentences without c-commanding negation. It also explains a clausemate requirement [S ...Neg...[−A]...] consistently reported by speakers of both languages in our study for all but subjunctive and (occasionally) neg-raising environments. We demonstrate that further distributional constraints attributed by Halpert (2012Halpert ( , 2015 to special Case-licensing needs of Zulu [−A] nominals are shared by [+A] DPs modified by kuphela-'only', and [+/−A] wh-phrases are subject to near-identical restrictions. This is a state of affairs that Halpert's approach would not predict and cannot explain. We build on Sabel andZeller (2006), andZeller (2008) in attributing the pattern to incompatibility between [+focus] features characteristic of negative concord items, 'only'-modified DPs, and wh-phrases, and [−focus] features of certain Zulu and Xhosa clausal positions. Thus all aspects of [−A] nominal distribution reduce to independently motivated features of the class of expressions to which they belong.

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Section: -Children [Intended: I Saw Children]mentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative concord and nominal licensing in Xhosa and Zulu

Carstens

Mletshe

2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…In particular, on the conceptual side, we would like to examine whether other cases that have been accounted for in terms of Multiple Agree can be re-analyzed in terms of our proposal. On the empirical side, it would be interesting to enquire if the cross-linguistic variations among NC patterns described in Giannakidou (2006) The fact that the negative expressions nooit 'never' and niets 'nothing' express a single negation is often referred to as 'negative spread', with negative concord being reserved to the relation between en and niet and the n-constituents (cf. den Besten 1989).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We should stress at the outset that our proposal is restricted to WF. Although we are convinced that our analysis can ultimately be extended to other NC languages, it is not clear to us at this point that it can capture all cross-linguistic variation in NC (see Giannakidou 2006 for discussion of variation across NC languages). We plan to return to the comparative aspect in future work.…”

Section: Agreementioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Concord and (Multiple) Agree: A Case Study of West Flemish

2010

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*This paper examines the formalization of negative concord in terms of the Minimalist Program, focusing entirely on negative concord in West Flemish. It is shown that a recent analysis of negative concord which advocates Multiple Agree is empirically inadequate.Instead of Multiple Agree, it is argued that a particular implementation of the simpler and less powerful binary Agree is superior in deriving the data in question.

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“…This in turn gives rise to doubts regarding the trigger for optional NegS. These issues are connected to the question of how negative concord is to be analyzed, which cannot be discussed here (see Haegeman 1995, Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991, 1996, Zeijlstra 2004, and Giannakidou 2005 on this issue). Summing up, this section showed that there is cross-linguistic and diachronic variation as to the distribution of negative objects.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

Microvariation in object positions: Negative Shift in Scandinavian

Engels¹

2011

Nord J Linguist

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In the Scandinavian languages, sentential negation must be licensed outside VP, necessitating leftward movement of negative objects, Negative Shift (NegS). While string-vacuous NegS is possible in all Scandinavian varieties, there is a fair amount of cross-linguistic variation as to non-string-vacuous NegS. In particular, the varieties contrast in which constituents can be crossed by NegS and whether or not crossing of a certain constituent requires the presence of an intervening verb.The paper discusses which difficulties for syntactic analysis arise from the variation as to the applicability of NegS and why other movement operations do not display such a range of variation.

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N‐Words and Negative Concord

Cited by 230 publications

References 48 publications

Negative concord and nominal licensing in Xhosa and Zulu

Negative concord and nominal licensing in Xhosa and Zulu

Negative Concord and (Multiple) Agree: A Case Study of West Flemish

Microvariation in object positions: Negative Shift in Scandinavian

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