Authors

Egor Tsedryk¹;  ¹ Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada

Discussion

This talk focuses on the syntactic and semantic distribution of the morpheme ni in Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. This morpheme must cooccur with the negator ne in the same clause, exhibiting so-called "negative concord": 

(1) Nixto nikoho *(ne) počuv. 'Nobody heard anyone.' [Ukrainian]

According to previous analyses (e.g., Brown 1999 on Russian), ni is a morphological reflex of a uninterpretable negation feature. Ni also marks negative coordination, in which case it has to be repeated in front of each coordinated NP:

(2) Ni Olena, ni Ljuba, ni Petro *(ne) pryjšli na svjato. 'Neither Olena, Ljuba, nor Petro came to the party.' [Ukrainian] 

The proposed analysis of ni is framed within Hamblin’s (1973) semantics, which Kratzer and Shimoyama (2017) applied to indeterminate pronouns in non-interrogative contexts. More precisely, ni is an alternative-sensitive operator that selects a Hamblin set. It is opposed to other alternative-sensitive operators, including the exclusive libo 'either':

(3) Libo Olena, libo Ljuba, libo Petja pridet na prazdnik. 'Either Olena, Ljuba, or Petja will come to the party.' [Russian]

After discussing such cases as (2) and (3), the proposed analysis is further extended to cases in which ni occurs in front of a single lexical NP, which denotes an atomic unit:

(4) Ty *(ne) maeš ni kropli sumlennja. lit.: 'You don't have a drop of conscience.' [Belarusian]

All in all, ni cannot be just a morphological reflex of an uninterpretable negative feature. It is a syntactic head that has its own selectional properties.

References

Brown, Sue. 1999. The syntax of negation in Russian. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 

Hamblin, Charles L. 1973. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language 10: 41–53. 

Kratzer, Angelika, and Junko Shimoyama. 2017. Indeterminate pronouns: The view from Japanese. In Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar, ed. by Chungmin Lee, Ferenc Kiefer, and Manfred Krifka, 123–143. Cham: Springer.