Publication |Sophia Linguistica

Hierarchy and Negative Concord

AUTHOR

Yu Nakajima

ABSTRACTS

I show that hierarchical structure is present within negative concord items on the grounds
that a negative fragment answer derives from movement and ellipsis. The presented
analysis suggests that the structure of words is syntactic structure, which theoretically
implies that the theory of Distributed Morphology is a promising model of grammar.
One of the theoretical consequences here is that negative concord items are the hybrid of
negative polarity items and negative quantifiers. This view leads to a unified account of
Watanabe (2004) and Kuno (2007). A key theoretical mechanism is feature sharing, which
derives the dual property of negative concord items and eliminates a problem in Watanabe
(2004).