Abstract
This paper investigates a pattern in the South Asian language Bangla which strongly resembles the finite/non-finite positioning of verbs in English and French reported in Pollock (1989). In finite clauses in Bangla, verbs precede negation, as in English, while in non-finite clauses verbs follow negation, as in French. The paper considers whether the analysis of (leftwards) movement of the verb to Tense/Agreement in finite clauses argued for by Pollock for French should be assumed to operate in the SOV language Bangla as well, potentially supporting a Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) head-initial analysis of Bangla, which has elsewhere regularly been taken to be a head-final language. Considering other patterns in the language relating to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing and quantifier scope in finite and non-finite clauses, it is argued that a leftwards head-movement analysis is unable to account for such patterns. A different analysis of the alternating position of negation and verbs is then suggested, which attributes this to the realization of negation either in the specifier or head position of NegP, drawing on Pollock’s (1989) analysis of the dual location of negative morphemes in French and on much recent work on alternations between specifier and head lexicalization (van Gelderen 2004 and others).
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Notes
Abbreviations: Nom = Nominative, Acc = Accusative, Loc = Locative, Gen = Genitive, Cp = Conjunctive Participle, Q = Question particle, Emph = Emphatic particle, Pres = Present, Fut = Future, Cont = Continuative, Ind = Indicative, Inf = Infinitive, Cond = Conditional, Ger = Gerund, Decl = Declarative, C= Complementizer, Cl = Classifier, Neg = Negation, Hab = Habitual, Top = Topic, Asp = Aspect.
In French, negation is often realized by two morphemes ne and pas. The former, ne, is a clitic which attaches to and moves with the verb, hence it does not indicate the underlying location of negation, which is signaled by the morpheme pas. In colloquial French, the clitic ne is regularly optional but pas is not.
For reasons which will shortly become clear, we do not consider an alternative potential explanation of these patterns, that NegP is high in Bangla (and possibly in Japanese and Korean), dominating the position of the subject in SpecTP. Such an assumption about the position of negation in Bangla will fail to capture contrasts in the scope of negation in finite and non-finite clauses, to be discussed in Sect. 3.2.
Alternatively, na might also be assumed to occur in the head of NegP, Neg0, and attach to the right of verb as it transits through Neg0 to T0.
It can be noted that the unacceptability of examples such as (44) in which na precedes the subject cannot be attributed to any ban on na occurring in sentence-initial position (perhaps due to an enclitic property). As (i) below shows, na can occur as the first element in a sentence:
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(i)
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(i)
See van Gelderen (2004) for discussion of some of the pressures which may sustain the fluctuation between Spec and head lexicalization and delay a full change to the reanalysis of phrasal elements as heads.
Note that the negative morpheme in the early Bangla example (45) is nohi and that the second clause makes use of the post-verbal positioning of the subject of the verb, as is not uncommon in colloquial Bangla or poetic writing.
The use of ki in these different linear positions does have some effect on the focus and interpretation of the yes/no question. If ki occurs in sentence-final position, the speaker has no particular expectations concerning whether the answer to the question will be positive or negative. Where ki occurs following the subject in (46b), the natural interpretation is that the temporal PP which follows ki is in focus and the speaker wishes to know whether the singing that the hearer is expected to carry out will occur on the wedding night or some other time. In (46c), the natural interpretation of the sentence is that the speaker knows that the hearer will be present at the wedding, and is asking whether s/he will be singing there, hence the predicate following ki is naturally in focus. Such factors therefore seem to influence the speaker’s placement of ki in yes/no questions and use of ki in the different positions that the syntax makes available.
Note that in addition to clause-final and clause-medial positions, the element jodi may also occur in clause-initial position, as illustrated in (49c). The yes/no particle ki and the emphatic particle na may not appear in fully clause-initial position, a restriction which can be suggested to be due to the enclitic nature of these particles, requiring some element to precede them for phonological support. The negative particle na does not share this enclitic property, and can occur in sentence-initial position, as illustrated in footnote 6.
Note that both the specifier and the head of the C-domain projections housing yes/no ki and conditional jodi will c-command the base positions of both objects and subjects, hence subject NPIs are licensed by both the pre-verbal and post-verbal occurrence of ki/jodi, as shown in (i) and (ii).
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(i)
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(ii)
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(i)
Concerning the relation of T to Neg, and the assumed absence of a selection relation between T and na in SpecNegP, it can be noted that heads may select for other heads but not for elements in the specifier positions of lower phrases. While NegP is not the direct complement of T0, it is often assumed that certain non-local selection between heads is possible, as, for example, when C potentially selects properties of T across intervening Topic and Focus phrases in the C-domain. Hence [+finite] T may be suggested to select for and be satisfied by a particular form of Neg0, but not an instantiation of SpecNegP.
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Simpson, A., Syed, S. Finiteness, negation and the directionality of headedness in Bangla. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 231–261 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9223-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9223-7