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A THEORY OF NEGATION
Hedde Zeijlstra Thursday, March 30, 1:30 PM MJH Rm 126 Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program In this talk I address three topics in the study of negation that appear to be typologically related: the syntactic status of negative markers, negative concord (the phenomenon that multiple morphosyntactically negative elements yield only one semantic negation) and the ban on true negative imperatives in some languages. First I describe three typological generalisations that should be predicted by a proper theory of the expression of (sentential) negation. After that I will analyse each phenomenon in detail, arguing that the only theory that can explain all three phenomena and the typological generalisations is one that takes negation to be a syntactically flexible category. I demonstrate that it then follows that negative concord must be analysed as an instance of syntactic agreement, and the ban on true negative imperatives follows from the general observation that operators that encode illocutionary force may not be outscoped by negation. Finally I discuss some consequences of this theory for the architecture of the syntactic clause. 
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