NEG Raising and Serbo-Croatian NPIs

Abstract

Collins and Postal (2014) postulate that English NPIs represent two distinct structures: a unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. Some NPIs, such as any and ever expressions, can instantiate either of these two structures in different contexts. Others (such as one use of jackshit) have only unary NEG structures. The present article seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this hypothesis by showing that the two series of NPIs in Serbian/Croatian (Progovac 1994) should be analyzed in terms of the two structure types postulated for English NPIs.

On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion

“…In accordance with CP2014's SOME/ any mapping rule (11b), when the lower occurrence of NEG spells out, SOME remains unpronounced. A similar proposal by Collins et al (2017) accounts for NC constructions in Ewe (see also Collins and Postal (2017) on Serbo-Croatian).…”

Negative polarity items in Ewe

“…Finally, we documented the existence of three adverbial NPIs in Ewe whose status in terms of the NPI framework of CP2014, Collins & Postal (2017) and the present paper is unresolved. They might be binary NPIs or unary NPIs, or some subcategory of NPI not recognized in the present framework.…”

“…However, Serbo-Croatian has clear nominal Type 2 NPIs. See Progovac (1994) for an overview and Collins & Postal (2017) for a treatment of the Serbo-Croatian facts in the framework of CP2014 and the present paper.…”

“…First, when a NEG raises from a negated existential DP, it leaves a copy in Ewe, but not in standard English. Specifying standard English in this generalization is important, since NEG raising can leave a copy in varieties of non-standard English, as in the non-standard English sentence I didn’t see nobody (see Blanchette 2015 and Collins & Postal 2017). This parameter is given below:…”