Two Types of Negation in Bengali

Abstract

Research on the syntax of negation has produced a lively debate in the literature. One of the central issues concerns whether designated Neg functional projections exist in the phrase structure of natural languages or whether negation elements should be more properly assimilated to adverbial (modificatory) phrases (cf. Holmberg and Platzack 1995 for Scandinavian). If Neg projections do exist, the question arises as to where they are situated within the clause, either as a universal fact, or a parametrizable fact about different languages (see Zanuttini 1991, Ouhalla 1990 for alternatives). Negative forms themselves have been analysed as forming the head of NegP, or sitting in its specifier (cf. Haegeman 1995 for West Flemish), again, possibly as a matter of parametric variation (Zanuttini 1991). However, one of the unstated assumptions of this debate has been that the various different syntactic options under hypothesis carry the same interpretative force. In other words, it is assumed that the logic of clause level negation is uniform and uncontroversial, and that the syntactic representation is what is in doubt, or maybe parametrizable in certain respects. On the other hand, in the literature, there is some evidence of different classes of clausal negative elements, even within the same language. In particular, many languages have different negative forms for non-finite clauses, or for imperatives (Zhang 1990). In this paper, I will present some evidence from Bengali to argue that clausal negation can actually take two semantically different forms. Specifically, I will propose that negation is not a sentential operator, as has been standardly assumed, but selectively binds particular variables introduced by particular syntactic heads. The evidence for this position will come from the scopal interactions between negation, the binding of the tense variable and the binding of the event variable. I will argue that these scopal interactions are not freely ordered, but rather betray the rigidity of clausal architecture and its mapping to the semantics, and which introduce unexpected semantic incompatibilities.