Lena Baunaz & Eric Lander

In this paper, we argue that the negative sequence developed by De Clercq (2013, 2018, 2020) can be expanded to account for what we here term modal negation (that is, negators appearing in modal contexts like conditionals, prohibitions, and so-called ‘subjunctive’ contexts), and that the modal domain must be located above T-negation in De Clercq’s hierarchy. We show that Romeyka, a variety of Greek spoken in northeastern Turkey (Sitaridou 2014ab, Chatzopoulou & Sitaridou 2014), shows evidence that the modal domain in the negative sequence must be decomposed into at least four distinct layers, each one corresponding to a particular syntactico-semantic context (prohibitive, volitional, counterfactual conditional, and possibility conditional). Not surprisingly, the negators we investigate show crosslinguistic variation in their syncretism patterns; we consider data from English [IE], Modern Greek [IE], Hungarian [Uralic], Latin [IE], Albanian [IE], Mandarin Chinese [Sino-Tibetan], and Vietnamese [Austroasiatic]). Nevertheless, the expanded negative sequence for which we argue obeys the *ABA restriction, in line with nanosyntactic expectations (Caha 2009).

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Authors:
Baunaz, Lena (University of Geneva)
Lander, Eric (University of Gothenburg)