Abstract
Constituent negation (CN) is commonly thought to be a subtype of natural language negation which does not exhibit substantial differences from the more frequent verbal negation. In this paper, I argue that at least Czech CN is different. I argue that its semantics targets both at-issue meaning and focus alternatives. The evidence will come from differences in interpretations between English and Czech with respect to negated comparatives adjoined to NPs (like no more than two people) and from many other types of negated constituents. I argue that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained if Slavic CN is treated as a focus-oriented particle, unlike English no which targets scalar alternatives.
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