The dynamics of negative concord

Japanese Negative Polarity Items and Negative Concord

Negative polarity items (NPIs) are a class of expressions whose distribution is restricted to affective contexts, especially to the negative context (Kato (1985)). Examples of the expressions traditionally counted as Japanese negative polarity items are: kessite ('ever'), nannimo ('anything'), daremo (`anyone'), dokomo (`anywhere'), tittomo (`not at all'), and sika ('only') (Ikeya and Kawamori ...

Negative Concord and the Distribution of Quantifiers

Negative Concord vs. Negative Polarity and the Acquisition of Japanese

The goal of this paper is to argue that negative concord is the “default value” for the two types of neg-sensitivity by investigating how Japanese children acquire NCIs in their language. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we review several syntactic differences between NPIs and NCIs and a morphosyntactic analysis of those items proposed by Kuno (2007). It is pointed ...

Capturing Design Dynamics the Concord Approach

'Computer-Supported Cooperative Work' is a young research area considering applications with strong demands on database technology. Especially design applications need support for cooperation and some means for controlling their inherent dynamics. However, today's CAD systems mostly consisting of a collection of diverse design tools typically do not support these requirements. Therefore, an enc...

Expletive Negation, Negative Concord and Feature Checking*

The aim of this paper is to explore some aspects of the syntax-semantics interface representations which correspond to expletive negation (EN) and negative concord (NC). I shall postulate that a syntactic operation of logical absorption, conceived as feature checking, is needed in the theory of grammar in order to account for both phenomena. EN instantiates a nonnegative context; it will be cha...