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Neg-words

What they are and what they are not and what follows from this

ORCiD logo with link | Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Goethe-University Frankfurt.

Published online: 21 August 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/elt.25001.wei
Abstract
This paper is concerned with neg-words that are usually defined by their occurrence in NC constructions. The common definition of neg-words has several weaknesses: for example, it does not allow to define NC in a non-circular way or it cannot explain why DN is possible in many NC languages. Therefore, an alternative definition is proposed in this paper: Neg-words are indefinite pronouns (or adverbs) that contain a negative morpheme, or indefinite pronouns (or adverbs) that have replaced such an indefinite pronoun (or adverb). Defining neg-words in this way has several advantages: it allows a non-circular and precise definition of NC, it can also explain why DN is also possible in NC languages (therefore, the term negative quantifier can be dispensed with), and it allows an alternative typological classification of NC and non-NC languages to the usual one in which NC and DN languages are contrasted. According to the view expressed here, non-NC languages are languages without neg-words (as defined here) and they cover a group of languages to which 80% to 90% of all languages belong. In addition, I analyze neg-words as Heimian indefinites with an interpretable neg-feature. This explains the wide range of uses of neg-words from weak indefinites (the default case) to negated existential quantifiers to universal quantifiers that scope over negation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Neg words, NCIs and negative quantifiers
  • 3.Neg-words: An alternative definition
  • 4.The key points
    • 4.1Indefinite pronouns and adverbs that contain a negative morpheme are sometimes NCIs and sometimes negative quantifiers
    • 4.2Non-negative NCIs never yield DN, negative NCIs often do
    • 4.3Proper nature of NC (i.e., the occurrence of multiple morphological negations yielding a single negation)
    • 4.4Typological rarity of DN-languages
    • 4.5Languages without NCI and without negative quantifiers
    • 4.6Is the universal absence of *nall nothing special?
  • 5.Analysis
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (77)
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