Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Negation is a universal property of human language, since it must be overtly expressed in all languages of the world. While other operators like questions or conditional can be substituted by a syntactic operation like for instance verb movement, negation is universally represented through a lexical morpheme. In all and only human languages it has the same semantic value of “inversion of the truth value of an utterance”. However, its universality ends here: contrary to other operators, which generally have a fixed position in the structure of the clause, negation is well known for being syntactically very unstable in terms of position both across languages and across different diachronic stages of the same language (the Jespersen cycle was first theorized on the basis of negation). Essentially, sentential negative markers can occur at all levels, in the CP (see for instance negative complementizers of the Celtic languages), the TP (as in the Romance preverbal negative markers) the vP (like German nicht) or even at the lowest level on the direct object (see German negative article kein-).

(1) Ní chuireann sé isteach ar phostanna (Irish, Mc Closkey 2017:9)

Neg-fin put.pres he in on jobs

He does not apply for jobs

(2) Gianni non mangia

Gianni not eats

Gianni does not eat

(3) Hans ist heute um 5 Uhr nicht gekommen

Hans is today at 5 hour not come

´Hans did not come at five today´

(4) Gisela hat keine Uhr

´Gisela has no watch´

At the same time, negation is morphologically very versatile, since a wide variety of morphemes can express sentential negation (adverbs, auxiliaries, articles, prepositions etc[CP2] .) In this work I will try to provide an analysis of the reason why the syntactic behavior of negative markers is so different on the basis of the idea that negation is not a simple semantic operation but is achieved through a set of different operations which correspond to distinct syntactic projections in the clausal spine. I will also argue that the reason why negation interacts with other operators like Focus and existentials is due to the fact that it contains the same feature, which corresponds to a set of semantic instructions causing an interference which can be captured in terms of relativized minimality.