A Study on Negative Sensitive Items in Persian

Abstract

This paper analyses various types of negative items, especially negative sensitive items in Persian. Negative sensitive items are classified by two sub-groups, which are negative polarity items and negative concord items. Typologically, most languages in the world have a tendency to have one of the items. Based on the tests of Vallduvi(1994) and Watanabe(2004), this paper scrutinizes several items, or expressions in Persian according to specific negative contexts and classifies the items into two groups of negative polarity items and negative concord items. Finally, it suggests that Persian has both negative polarity items and negative concord items unlike other natural languages.