Authors

Discussion

This paper deals with the syntactic and semantic conditions under which negative items can be licensed in Hungarian. Following Ladusaw (1996) and Krifka (2001), it assumes that in negative sentences, the whole proposition is in the scope of the abstract OP_NEG operator, sitting in the left periphery. 

The paper presents a purely cartographic account of licensing negative items in Strict Negative Concord Hungarian, building on Surányi’s (2006) distinction of s-words vs. sem-phrases and proposing a split between semantic vs. syntactic licensing. In accordance with Giannakidou (2020), Penka (2020), and Déprez (2018), the paper takes NCIs in Hungarian to be morphologically negative indefinites, in need of both syntactic and semantic licensing. The preverbal or postverbal position of NCIs is immaterial for their licensing. In the proposed account, OP_NEG, harboured by ForceP in the left periphery of the clause (see Rizzi 1997, 2004), forms a chain with the NEG₀ head of the clausal NEGP. 

When multiple s-words appear pre-verbally, they move to Spec of NEGP (above TP) in one step as an ordered set, much in the fashion multiple wh-words do in some Slavic languages (see Boskovic 2002). While s-words, which are NCIs proper, need to be licensed both syntactically and semantically, pre-verbal sem-phrases are NQs, sitting in SemP in the left-periphery, and requiring only semantic licensing. They can also act as licensers for post-verbal sem-phrases. Post-verbal sem-phrases in turn are NCIs in need of both syntactic and semantic licensing.