Chapter 11. The nature and licensing of hi:tʃ elements in Persian

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of elements such as hi:tʃkӕs “anyone” in Persian, which have been described as either Negative Polarity Items (Taleghani 2006) or Negative Concord Items (Kwak 2010) in prior literature. Such claims have typically been used to motivate analyses of Persian NegP as being high in the clause structure, above TP. This is in contrast to more recent analyses which have argued for a low position of negation (Kahnemuyipour 2017). Here, we present experimental evidence showing that c-commanding negation is not sufficient for licensing hi:tʃ elements, unlike English any. We also show that hi:tʃ elements have many properties in common with similar elements in Japanese and Korean, where there is less certainty in designating these as Negative Concord Items, and where negation is independently argued to be low. Thus, we claim, the distribution of hi:tʃ elements cannot be upheld as a proof of syntactically high negation, under either a polarity item or concord item analysis. We close the paper with a typological discussion, suggesting that the properties of hi:tʃ elements and their kin seem to be broadly shared among OV languages more generally.