Colloquial emphatic negation in Russian and morphology of negative concord

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.