Negative features on negative indefinites: Evidence from split scope

Abstract

The assumption that negative indefinites (NIs) are semantically non-negative elements associating with sentential negation has proven fruitful to account for the behaviour of NIs in languages exhibiting negative concord (NC). Under this view, NIs carry a negative feature that has to be licenced by a semantic negation. There are, however, different ways in which licencing of negative features can be spelled out. This paper shows that several accounts proposed in the literature are problematic. Crucial evidence comes from constructions where another semantic operator takes scope in between the negation and the indefinite. Parallel data have been discussed for NIs in German and Dutch under the label split scope, and I show that they also bear on the analysis of NIs in NC languages. The fact that another semantic operator can take scope in between the negation and the NI is particularly problematic for analyses positing that NIs semantically associate with negation, for example, Ladusaw (1992, 1995) and Kratzer (2005), who build on the indefinite nature of NIs and postulate that NIs have to be bound by a negation operator. The conclusion is that the relation NIs bear towards sentential negation is purely syntactic and that negative features on NIs are best analysed as agreement features.