In Serbian/Croatian (henceforth, SC), pure sentential negation is realized as a negative particle, ne (NegE), proclitic on the first finite verb form (Progovac 1994: 34!35):
(19) M ilan poznaje M arij-u. (SC)
M i. knows M a.- A C C
‘M i. knows M a.’
(20) M ilan ne poznaje M arij-u. ‘M i. doesn’t know M a.’ (21) M ilan poznaje ne M arij-u.
No other overt negative marker is required; ne cannot be omitted from negative clauses (Progovac 1994: 36); ne forms a syntactic unit with the finite verb. I conclude, therefore, that NegE bears the feature [+N EG] underlyingly, rather than SpecNegP. If the generalization in (2) is correct, I predict that SC is an NC language.
SC has two series of what Progovac (1994) terms NPIs, labeled i-N PIs and
ni-NPIs to reflect the fact that members of one set begin with the prefix i- while members of the second begin with the prefix ni-. Progovac glosses the i-NPIs and ni-NPIs as anyone, anything, and so on, and no-one, nothing, and so on, respectively, but stresses (Progovac 1994: 40, 42) that the distribution of these elements is by no means identical to that of the two series of indefinites in SE. A couple of comments are in order at this point. First, the fact that the distribution of the i- and ni-NPIs in SC is different from the distribution of the any- and no- XPs respectively in SE does not necessarily mean that the i-NPIs differ from the
any-XPs or that the ni-NPIs differ from the no-XPs in respect of any nontrivial properties. It is entirely possible that the corresponding XPs in the two languages are essentially identical and that their divergent distributions are the result of differences elsewhere in the grammars of their respective languages. Indeed, this is what I conclude later in this chapter.23
footnote 30.
24. I assume with Haegeman (1995) that, where the negative tag is licit in (22c), that is, where the antecedent is positive, the negative quantifier has local scope, does not count as an operator, and is not associated with a NegP. The wide scope reading of the negative is therefore dependent on clausal negation being marked on the verb; it is in this sense that the negative quantifier (on this reading) is licensed by the polarity of the clause. On tags, see Lakoff (1969) and section 1.3.
25. See Quer (1993) for review and discussion of approaches to the licensing of negative quanti- fiers.
26. Within the terms of his analysis, Acquaviva (1993: 24) suggests that those elements often refer- red to as negative quantifiers “are closer to polarity items than to wh-operators”.
Second, a word is perhaps in order on the issue of Progovac’s use of the term NPI for the ni-prefixed series of XPs in SC. One might wonder whether the ni- XPs of SC (or, indeed, the no-XPs of SE or the n-words of various Romance varieties) are NPIs at all. These elements are more usually labeled negative indefinite universal quantifiers (with no particular licensing conditions) rather than polarity items (with specific)albeit complex)licensing conditions). However, there is some reason to suspect that even negative quantifiers (with sentential scope) have licensing conditions and that, consequently, the term NPI may not be misplaced. As Haegeman (1996b: 1) puts it, these elements “carry the semantic-syntactic feature N EG and . . . this feature is subject to a specific syntactic licensing condition”. (See also Rizzi 1982: 121!27, section 2, for relevant discussion.) There is, for example, evidence that the presence of negative quantifiers has necessary consequences)albeit sometimes non-overt) elsewhere in their clauses. In SC, for example, ni-NPIs necessarily co-occur with the pre-verbal negative marker ne. The presence of ne clearly satisfies some licensing condition of the ni-NPIs in much the same way that c-commanding negation is one way of licensing any-XPs in SE which are labeled NPIs without hesitation. Similar conditions can be argued to apply to negative quantifiers in other languages. Even in a language like SE, the presence of a negative quantifier can affect clausal polarity, even though this has no overt impact on verb morphology. For example, when familiar tests are performed on (22a) to determine the polarity of the sentence, they show it to be potentially negative:24 (22) a. John’s done nothing.
b. John’s done nothing and neither/?so has M ary. c. John’s done nothing, has he/?hasn’t he?
I therefore conclude that negative quantifiers (with sentential scope) such as ni- NPIs (SC), no-XPs (SE), and n-words (Romance) are indeed polarity items in the sense that their occurrence is subject to licensing conditions. In this respect,25 I am therefore happy to retain the term ni-NPI used for SC by Progovac and to adopt the term no-NPI for SE for consistency. I now return to the discussion of26 SC negation.
27. Niko is Serbian; nitko is Croatian. The judgments in the text examples apply to both Serbian and Croatian.
28. Thanks to Joe Cunningham for judgments on Cockney. See Labov (1972a, b) for discussion of other NSEs that demonstrate NC.
29. See Yaeger-Dror (1997) for pragmatic and sociolinguistic discussion of negative and auxiliary contraction.
The most salient characteristic of the ni-NPIs in SC is that, irrespective of their position, they must, as already mentioned, be clause-mate with the pre- verbal negative marker ne (Progovac 1994: 37 (98)):27
(23) a. M ario (ne) vidi ni(t)ko- ga. (SC) M . ne sees no-one-A C C
‘M . can’t see anyone.’ b. Ni(t)ko(ne) poznaje M arij-u.
no-one ne knows M .- ACC
‘No-one knows M .’
Furthermore, multiple ni-NPIs can co-occur in a given clause without leading to logical DN, provided, of course, that pre-verbal ne is also present in the same clause (Ljiljana Progovac, personal communication).
(24) M ilan (ne) daje ni(t)komeništa. (SC) M . ne gives no-one nothing
‘M . isn’t giving anything to anyone.’
The examples in (23a, b) show negative doubling; the one in (24) shows both negative spread and negative doubling. SC is clearly an NC language, as predicted by the generalization in (2).