Non-local syntactic interactions across an NP/DP boundary: Negative concord and wh-movement

Abstract

The paper reports the results of a syntactic experiment which was aimed at comparing locality conditions imposed on two well-known longdistance syntactic processes: intra-clausal negative concord (licensing of negative pronouns by sentential negation) and wh-movement in matrix constituent questions (placement of interrogative pronouns at the beginning of the clause). Since only the latter non-local interaction nearly always results in overt displacement (while negative pronouns may remain in their base position upon agreeing with the Neg0 head), we hypothesized that sentences exemplifying negative concord should receive higher scores than sentences with wh-movement. Two structural configurations were investigated: the negative pronoun or the interrogative pronoun was (i) either (the head of) the direct object of the verb, (ii) or it was embedded inside a nominal (NP/DP). In addition to sentences with negative concord and wh-movement, our materials also included those without any such long-distance interactions. Thus, we asked 60 native speakers of Russian to judge such sentences (as well as some fillers) on a 7-point Likert scale. The results, somewhat surprisingly, did not bear out our expectations. Encapsulating the Goal of an Agree relationship inside a nominal does not lead to a significant change in mean scores (except for sentences with negative concord), while there is a statistically significant difference between sentences with negative concord on the one hand and other types of sentences (those containing wh-movement and those without any non-local dependencies) on the other. Such a stark contrast between negative concord and wh-movement casts doubt on approaches trying to assimilate them (and eventually aiming to reduce negative concord to Aʹ-movement of negative pronouns to their licensor).