The Genesis of Negative Concord: Syntax and Morphology of Negative Doubling

Abstract

I show that negative concord involves checking of the neg-features prompted by the uninterpretable focus feature of concord items, recasting Haegeman and Zanuttini's (1991, 1996) original account in the general theory of feature checking. A key theoretical mechanism is feature copying, which derives the core part of Neg-Factorization and is also shown to provide the foundation for the notion of chains defined in terms of occurrences. The proposed analysis of negative concord supports Merchant's (2001) theory of ellipsis, according to which ellipsis is PF deletion and requires semantic identity. I also discuss in detail how morphology interacts with properties of negative concord, taking into account wide-ranging crosslinguistic patterns.