Two Types of Negation in Bengali

Research on the syntax of negation has produced a lively debate in the literature. One of the central issues concerns the status of NegP functional projections exist in the phrase structure of natural language (see Pollock 1989, Laka 1994, Haegeman 1995, Zanuttini 1991, 1997), or whether negation elements should be more properly assimilated to adverbial (modificatory) phrases (cf. Holmberg and Platzack 1995 for Scandinavian). If NegP 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, Rizzi 1998, 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). 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, there is some evidence in the literature of different classes of clausal negative elements, even within the same language. In particular, many languages have different negative forms for non-finite clauses (ref.), or for imperatives (Zhang 1990). In this paper, I will present some evidence from Bengali to argue that clausal negation can actually take two logically different forms. To this extent, I will not be directly contributing to the important syntactic debate that is already going on, but to an understanding of the semantics of clausal negation. On the other hand, the argument I make will have implications for syntactic analyses, a point which I will take up in the final section of the paper. Bengali possesses two distinct sentential negation markers which occur in different morphosyntactic contexts, and with different aspectual consequences. The existence of these two negation markers poses a number of puzzles for linguistic theory. One set of questions naturally involves the syntactic positioning and featural make up of the two morphemes involved. However, the puzzle I will be focusing on here is more semantic in nature: in what way, if any, do these two negation markers differ in the interpretations they give rise to? I will argue that there is good evidence to believe that the two forms we find in Bengali are not merely different inflectional forms of the same basic functional element, but in fact represent two clearly distinct negation strategies in the semantics.