The Landscape of Negative Dependencies: Negative Concord and N‐Words

Abstract

This chapter updates an earlier discussion of n‐words and negative concord (NC) offered by the first author. Our goal here is to address the considerable developments in the area of n‐words and NC that took place since 2006. As the title suggests, we study negative dependencies within the context of negative dependencies. We have chosen this term as a theory‐neutral way to refer to phenomena that in one way or another involve dependency of an expression on the presence of negation. Several major negative dependencies can be distinguished; negative polarity, NC, negative quantifiers in Germanic languages, and even the expression of negation itself have been discussed in this context. Negative dependencies form a landscape: they share a space as grammatical phenomena, for instance sensitivity to the presence of negation – but, at the same time, the dependencies are not identical. For instance, the need for negation of a negative polarity item such as any does not derive from the same source as the need of negation for an n‐word, which has a more narrow distribution than any . And within the class of n‐words (the main focus of this chapter) there is considerable variation as well. Our approach is inspired by a long tradition of polarity research that acknowledges diversity and the fact that polarity phenomena are lexically driven. In presenting the phenomena, we apply a compositional perspective by connecting the nature of the sensitivity to the morphosyntactic, semantic, or pragmatic properties of the negation‐sensitive items.

Assessing the Role of Experimental Evidence for Interface Judgment: Licensing of Negative Polarity Items, Scalar Readings, and Focus

“…NPI-licensing, then, illustrates a synergy between semantics and syntax, and raises the question of well-formedness that is determined by both. In addition to any, either , we see indeed that many NPIs appear to be subject to severe grammatical constraints, e.g., Greek NPIs, “n-words” (see Laka, 1994 ; Giannakidou, 2006 ; Giannakidou and Zeijlstra, 2017 ). Generally, the literature on NPIs (which we will not review here, but see Giannakidou, 2011 for a recent overview) has shown that a substantial part of NPI violations involve grammatical violations that have to do with syntactic constraints too.…”

“…With NPIs that are more narrowly sensitive to negation, such as e.g., n-words, or the Dutch NPI hoeven “need,” it is reasonable to assume that the abstract lexical semantic feature is not POL but [+Neg] (see Lin, 2015 for some recent discussion on the acquisition of this feature and its contrast with acquisition of broader NPIs such as any). In the literature on n-words it is very common to assume [+NEG] (Zeijlstra, 2004 ; Giannakidou and Zeijlstra, 2017 for an overview). In any case, POL and NEG would be the lexical indexing of the NPI-dependency in the grammatical representation of the NPI word.…”

Negative concord in classical Greek case study : Xenophon

“…Literature on the nature of n-words and NPIs is huge and the most relevant theories have been discussed e.g. in Willis (2013), Penka (2015), Giannakidou & Zeijlstra (2017) and others. All concepts have their pros and cons and linguists are far from unanimous.…”

“…Indeed, we have a few studies with more satisfying and modern approaches, like those by Denizot (2011Denizot ( , 2012Denizot ( , 2013 and some other works analysing the development of negation throughout the history of Greek language (including Modern Greek), like Horrocks (2014), Willmot (2013) and many studies by Giannakidou (e.g. 2006, Giannakidou & Zeijlstra 2017, oriented rather towards Modern Greek (and other modern languages), as well as the recent monograph by Chatzopoulou (2019). These authors mostly prefer a synthetic approach, where AG is only used as a stepping stone to the investigation of subsequent linguistic periods.…”

Keep 'only' strong

“…In contrast, solo in 14 We can make the same point with negative indefinites ('n-words', Laka 1990). Spanish is a 'non-strict' negative concord language (Giannakidou & Zeijlstra 2017). As such, in post-verbal position, negative indefinites are only licensed with ccommanding negation, as in (15) (or with a c-commanding negative indefinite).…”