Negative Features on Negative Indefinites: Evidence from Split Scope

The assumption that negative indefinites are semantically non-negative elements associating with sentential negation has proven fruitful to account for the behaviour of negative indefinites in languages exhibiting negative concord. Under this view, negative indefinites carry a negative feature that has to be licensed by a semantic negation. This paper critically discusses and evaluates different ways in which the notion of negative features can be spelled out. Particular attention is paid to approaches that build on the indefinite nature of negative indefinites and postulate that negative indefinites have to be bound by a negation operator (e.g. Ladusaw, 1992; Kratzer, 2005). It is shown that such analyses are problematic in light of the fact that another semantic operator can take scope in between the negation and the negative indefinite. Parallel data have been discussed for negative indefinites in German and Dutch under the label split scope (e.g. Jacobs, 1980; de Swart, 2000; Abels and Mart́ı, 2010).