(Non‐)occurrence of sentential no in Spanish negative sentences

Abstract

It is generally claimed that preverbal n‐phrases (Laka 1990) are incompatible with sentential no in Spanish. However, no is optional with a preverbal Topic n‐phrase. Furthermore, no is obligatory if the preverbal n‐phrase occurs to the left of a wh‐complementiser or between a non‐wh‐complementiser and its doubled form. The Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995) allows us to offer a unified explanation of the distribution of no, including the aforementioned cases. The proposal is that Spanish negative sentences contain a projection NegP, whose head bears a semantically interpretable feature that is responsible for the negative polarity of the sentence and, crucially, also contains an uninterpretable feature that must be checked before Spell‐Out. Moving an n‐phrase through SpecNegP is one way to achieve this. This is the case for Focus and moved Topics. Otherwise, no is needed. This is the case when there is no preverbal n‐phrase and with Topics merged preverbally. These Topics include n‐phrases occurring to the left of a wh‐complementiser or between a non‐wh‐complementiser and its doubled form, since movement from a VP‐internal position in these cases would violate economy principles.