1932

Abstract

Languages may vary greatly in the way they express negation. Most languages exploit specifically designated negative markers, such as English . Many languages may also use negative indefinites (such as English or ) to express negation. The behavior of these negative indefinites is subject to crosslinguistic variation: In some languages, negative markers and negative indefinites cannot express a single semantic negation ( means that everybody came and not that nobody came), but in other languages they can. Languages with these properties, such as Italian, are called Negative Concord languages. In this review, I discuss the difference between negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and languages that do not. I also compare the behaviors of negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and so-called Negative Polarity Items. This article provides an accurate overview of recent developments in the study of negation and negative dependencies.

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2016-01-14
2024-04-29
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