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Strict and Non-strict Negative Concord in Hungarian: A Unified Analysis

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Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ((SNLT,volume 94))

Abstract

Surányi (2006) observed that Hungarian has a hybrid (strict + non-strict) negative concord system. This paper proposes a unified analysis of that system within the general framework of Zeijlstra (2004, 2008) and, especially, Chierchia (2013), with the following new ingredients. Sentential negation nem is the same full negation in the presence of both strict and non-strict concord items. Preverbal senki ‘n-one’ type negative concord items occupy the specifier position of either nem ‘not’ or sem ‘nor’. The latter, sem, spells out is ‘too, even’ in the immediate scope of negation; is/sem are focus-associating heads on the clausal spine. Sem can be seen as an overt counterpart of the phonetically null head that Chierchia dubs NEG; it is capable of invoking an abstract (disembodied) negation at the edge of its projection.

I thank G. Chierchia, M. Esipova, A. Giannakidou, P. Jeretič, K. É. Kiss, H. Zeijlstra, and the reviewers for discussion and comments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chierchia’s [[n-D]] feature corresponds to Zeijlstra’s [uNeg] (Chierchia 2013: 233). [[n-D]] is checked by the exhaustifier OALT, whereas the negation within the scope of OALT is needed for semantic coherence; see a brief explanation of Chierchia’s semantics in Sect. 3.

  2. 2.

    A new argument in Surányi (2006) for the universal interpretation of some n-words is that in pre-focus position, they must be specific. But pre-focus existential-based NPIs that are licensed by extra-clausal negation must likewise be specific, and they cannot be construed as universals. Therefore, the specificity requirement in pre-focus position probably has to be captured in some different way.

  3. 3.

    Such an explanation of the scope restriction will also prevent universal senki from filling in for mindenki. But I am abandoning that 1981 assumption anyway.

  4. 4.

    I maintain that the requirement is in terms of scope, not c-command, in agreement with Hoeksema (2000: 123): “It is argued that triggering is sensitive to the scope of negation and negative operators, but that a syntactic treatment in terms of c-command is problematic, because semantic scope and syntactic c-command, no matter how we define the latter, and at which level we check it, do not see eye to eye on all the relevant cases.” The reason why it may seem that decreasing operators must c-command polarity-sensitive items at spell-out is that such operators do not take inverse scope and polarity-sensitive items do not automatically lower into their scope.

  5. 5.

    Two issues are left for further research. (i) The fact that the counterparts of (24)–(25) are not available in Italian would be easily predicted if non, in contrast to nem, were a specifier and not a head in NegP. But non is standardly viewed as a head, so the explanation of the cross-linguistic contrast must lie elsewhere. (ii) The fact that Ki szólt?—Senki. serve as canonical question-answer pairs (cf. ‘Who spoke?—No one’) may require the assumption of an elided nem in the fragment answer, cf. Giannakidou (2000: 486) for Modern Greek.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Anna Szabolcsi

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  1. Anna Szabolcsi
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Correspondence to Anna Szabolcsi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Huba Bartos

  2. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Marcel den Dikken

  3. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Zoltán Bánréti

  4. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Tamás Váradi

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Szabolcsi, A. (2018). Strict and Non-strict Negative Concord in Hungarian: A Unified Analysis. In: Bartos, H., den Dikken, M., Bánréti, Z., Váradi, T. (eds) Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_15

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