Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

19.06. Rok Žaucer (Nova Gorica): A case of apparently unlicensed NCIs in Slovenian  [zoom]

Slovenian is claimed to be a strict negative-concord language (Ilc 2019, Giannakidou & Zeijlstra 2017). I will introduce a Slovenian construction which combines a finite verb and one or more NCIs but no negator, and which as such, at first sight, appears to challenge the above view. In the context of better known structures that involve negator deletion, such as fragment answers, I will discuss the possibilities and the restrictions characterizing this construction and the variation in the pronunciation of the negator, and I will suggest that the construction involves a VP-fronting operation that can lead to the deletion of the negator.