Colloquial emphatic negation in Russian and morphology of negative concord

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Abstract

Alongside the standard negation, colloquial Russian has grammaticalized an alternative negation marker, xuj ‘dick’ and its euphemisms, that has negative force but does not license ni-phrases in its scope. Adopting the overall approach of Zeijlstra (2004) to negation and negative concord, I explore the properties of this construction to provide novel evidence that both semantic licensing and morphological concord are implicated in forming ni-negative indefinites in Slavic. Specifically, I interpret the inability of the negator xuj to license ni-negative indefinites as evidence that ni-negative indefinites undergo morphological concord with Neg0, which is spelled out as the standard negator ne.

Original languageAmerican English
JournalJournal of Slavic Linguistics
Volume31
Issue numberFASL30
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2024

Keywords

  • emphatic negation
  • negative concord
  • ni-indefinites
  • taboo negation

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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