On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion

This article presents a novel analysis ofNegative Auxiliary Inversion(NAI) constructions such asdidn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.

PPs without Disguises: Reply to Bruening

Bresnan and Nikitina (2009) and Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008) show that, contrary to standard assumptions, fixed-theme idioms may appear in to-constructions under certain pragmatic circumstances. Bruening (2010a) contends that the cases they present are in fact R(ightward)-dative shifts, double object constructions with the object projected to the right. In this article, we argue that Bruening’s proposed theoretical apparatus is unnecessarily complex and ad hoc and falls short of explaining the main facts it is supposed to deal with, massively overgenerating. A regular PP structure is argued to be empirically more adequate and conceptually simpler, avoiding the main problems of the R-dative shift analysis. New empirical evidence concerning pairlist readings and scope freezing also suggests that the empirical facts about idioms should be reconsidered in completely different terms.

Frozen Scope and WCO: New Insights into the Structure of Russian Ditransitives

We present novel data on Russian ditransitives with two Quantificational objects, which parallel the relevant English facts (Larson 1990) whereby inverse scope disappears when the quantificational Dative precedes the quantificational Accusative within the VP. We argue that the Russian facts should not be analyzed in terms of Superiority, as in English (Bruening 2001). Furthermore, wider possibilities for overt QP displacement in Russian and the scope freezing that obtains in such contexts (Antonyuk-Yudina 2009), taken with the observed parallelism between the two languages in the relevant respects, allow us a new perspective on the scope freezing in ditransitives for both languages.