On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites

Negative Indefinites (NIs) in languages such as Dutch and German may give rise to split-scope readings. Sentences like German Du must keine Krawatte anziehen (‘you must wear no tie’) have a reading where the modal takes scope in between the negation and the indefinite. In this paper I argue that West Germanic NIs are not negative quantifiers (in the Montegovian sense), but complex syntactic structures that consist of an abstract negative operator and an indefinite that are spelled out as a single word. Split-scope effects result from application of the copy theory of movement. I argue that in split-scope constructions, though they are spelled out as a single word, after Quantifier Raising the negative operator is interpreted in a higher copy and the indefinite in a lower copy of the NI. Furthermore I demonstrate that alternative analyses that take NIs in Dutch and German to be negative quantifiers, n-words, or the result of amalgamation or incorporation processes face problems that the analysis presented in this paper does not encounter

Universal Quantifier PPIs

Why have Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) that are universal quantifiers only been attested in the domain of modal auxiliaries (cf. Homer t.a., Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2010, 2013) and never in the domain of quantifiers over individuals? No PPI meaning everybody or everything has ever been reported. In this paper, I argue that universal quantifier PPIs actually do exist, both in the domain of quantifiers over individuals and in the domain of quantifiers over possible worlds, as, I argue, is predicted by the Kadmon & Landman (1993) - Krifka (1995) - Chierchia (2006, 2013) approach to NPIhood. However, since the covert exhaustifier that according to Chierchia (2006, 2013) is induced by these PPIs (and responsible for their PPI-hood) can act as an intervener between the PPI and its anti-licenser, it is concluded in this paper that a universal quantifier PPIs may scope below it and thus appear in disguise; their PPI-like behaviour only becomes visible once they morpho-syntactically precede their anti-licenser. Another conclusion of this paper is that Dutch iedereen (‚everybody’), opposite to English everybody, is actually a PPI