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Negative ... Concord?

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Abstract

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of negative concord (NC) should allow for the possibility of NC involving scoping of a universal quantifier above negation. I propose that Greek NC instantiates this option.Greek n-words will be analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifierswhich need negation in order to be licensed, but must raise abovenegation in order to yield the scoping ∀¬. This gives thecorrect interpretation of NC structures as general negative statements.The effect is achieved by application of QR, and the account is fullycompositional, as only sentence negation is the vehicle of logical negation¬. Greek n-words are also compared to n-words in Romance, Slavic,and Hungarian. This analysis, if correct, has two important consequences.First, theanalysis will provide a strong argument for retainingQR in the syntax-semanticsmapping: we need it in order to interpret NC. Second,by employing a mechanismwhich is present in the grammar for the scopeof quantifiers anyway, we have asimpler theory which makes NC look less anomalous; appeal to a mechanisminvoked just to account for NC, asin the ``negative absorption'' tradition, isthus rendered unnecessary.

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Giannakidou, A. Negative ... Concord?. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 18, 457–523 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006477315705

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