Colloquial emphatic negation in Russian and morphology of negative concord

Authors

  • David Erschler Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Keywords:

Negation, Negative concord, emphatic negation, ni-indefinites, taboo negation

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.

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Published

2023-12-24

How to Cite

Erschler, D. “Colloquial Emphatic Negation in Russian and Morphology of Negative Concord”. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 31, no. FASL 30 issue, Dec. 2023, pp. 1-18, https://ojs.ung.si/index.php/JSL/article/view/171.

Issue

Section

FASL proceedings 2021

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