Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Syntactic effects of negation — A’-interactions and more
- Date
- Thursday 16 October 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.07
Abstract
In this talk, I discuss different effects negation can have on the syntactic derivation in four languages from West and East Africa. In Dagbani (Mabia, Ghana) and Hausa (Chadic, Nigeria), sentential negation blocks the occurrence of a particular marker, the disjoint marker in Dagbani, or forces a particular form of the auxiliary in Hausa. In both languages, these effects are usually seen with A’-dependencies.
A different set of effects can be observed in Shupamem (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon) and Gweno (Bantu, E65, Tanzania). In both languages, negation is connected to a set of phi-features co-referent with the subject. Whereas in Gweno (for which all data are based on the ongoing PhD of Alexandrine Dunlap from U Florida), the negation itself shows agreement with the subject, negation in Shupamem leads to the presence of a postverbal pronoun co-referent with the subject. In both languages, interactions of these pronouns with A’ processes can be observed.
At the end of the talk, I will zoom in on Shupamem and propose an initial analysis based on fieldwork data collected this summer in Yaoundé, Cameroon. In a nutshell, I extend the analysis for negative concord from Zeijlstra (2004, 2008, 2022) to negation in general, arguing that a covert high negative operator needs to stand in an A’-agreement relation with the overtly spelled-out negation.
References
- Zeijlstra, H. (2004). Sentential negation and negative concord. Ph. D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.
- Zeijlstra, H. (2008). Negative concord is syntactic agreement. Ms., University of Amsterdam.
- Zeijlstra, H. (2022). Negation and negative dependencies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.