Negation in Select South Asian Languages

Abstract

Negation occupies a significant focus in the syntactic study of languages. The phenomena of negation in select South Asian languages reveal significant generalizations. In some languages, negation is expressed by lexical items while others are morphological. The paper primarily focuses on two aspects: first, the morphological distribution of negative markers in different clause structures including sentential and constituent negation. The morphological parsing of sentential negation shows that the negative is suffixed to the tense/verb form if the overt tense form exists. This pattern of morphological alignment, where tense occurs preceding the sentential negative is analogous to the syntactic representation, where the TP occurs above NegP within the functional domain. The sentential negation occurs below TP and above vP, whereas the constituent negation adjoins to the constituent. The second part is the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in these languages and their licensing conditions. We show that there are different kinds of NPIs present in SALs such as classifier, quantifier, wh-NPIs and idiomatic-NPIs. All NPIs are marked with the emphatic particle at the word-final position having exclusiveness meaning even in negative and inclusiveness meaning also in affirmative sentences. Keeping in view, the structural restrictions of NPI, we analyse NPIs adopting (Kumar, Negation and licensing of negative polarity items in Hindi syntax, Routledge, 2006) c-commanding strategy, feature checking and alternative-based approach to NPIs (Chierchia, Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. OUP Oxford, 2013), where the NPIs inherently possess a quantificational scale. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.