Negative Concord in Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

This study examines negative concord (NC) constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The study shows that MSA is a strict NC language with n-words that must co-occur with a negative expression yielding only one logical negation to the semantics in spite of the fact that they can contribute negation on their own in fragment answers. I argue that an analysis of NC in MSA as syntactic agreement whereby n-words are assumed be non-negative indefinites with a formal negative feature that needs to be checked and deleted against semantic negation can better capture the distribution of n-words in the language than other approaches that take n-words to be either negative polarity items (NPIs) or negative quantifiers.