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Preverbal N-Words and Anti-Agreement Effects
Jon Franco and Alazne Landa
34-42 (complete pdf)
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This paper accounts for the syntactic distribution of N-words in preverbal and postverbal positions in Basque Spanish and explains the nature of the ban on pre-verbal negative concord in Standard Spanish. Furthermore, it discriminates between what is transferred from Basque, if anything, and what is kept as part of the syntax of Romance languages. These two goals have been accomplished by determining the syntactic properties of Basque Spanish N-words and comparing them with the syntactic properties of negative elements in Basque and Standard Spanish. Thus, whereas Basque Spanish N-words abide by the syntax of Standard Spanish (i.e., negative XPs are not NPIs), some similarities with Basque, such as seemingly parallel word orders and absence of anti-agreement effects, induced speakers of this variety to interpret the doubling NEG head as an agreement marker and develop a negative concord relation with the preverbal N-word.



Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Nuria Sagarra and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

Table of contents

ISBN 978-1-57473-413-3 library binding
vi + 341 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Printed edition: $250.00



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