Abstract

In this chapter, the analysis according to which negative indefinites have to be licensed by sentential negation is extended to languages without negative concord. This step is motivated by a phenomenon negative indefinites in German exhibit: In certain contexts, negative indefinites yield a split reading, where another operator takes scope in between the negative and the indefinite meaning component. This indicates that negation is not interpreted where it is marked morpho-syntactically. An analysis of negative indefinites in German is spelled out, including a detailed investigation of scope splitting in certain constructions (intensional verbs, predicative positions, topic-focus accent). This analysis is compared to other approaches to scope splitting proposed in the literature.

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