April 13, 2015

In this talk I discuss a number of restrictions on sentential negation marking in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language, and sketch a tentative analysis of the observed morphosyntactic facts as having a semantic basis. The two different negation markers (-ro and -č’o) are analysed, based on the proposal in Ramchand & Svenonius 2014, as taking complements of a different syntactic size and semantic type.

In particular, I show that the two negation markers attested in Avar differ in the type of semantic object they can compose with: for the present and future tenses -ro combines with a Fin*P denoting a set of propositions, whereas past-tense negation utilises the biclausal predicational strategy.

The question why past tense forms cannot combine with -ro has remained unanswered. It remains to be seen whether the proposal made for -č’o can be made compatible with the use of the present-tense negative copula/auxiliary heč’o as the auxiliary in analytic verb forms.

I further draw a number of cross-linguistic comparisons between Avar on the one hand, and Bengali, Mebengokre and the Salish languages on the other.

Keywords: syntax, semantics, negation, nominalization, event semantics, situation semantics, Avar

This is a talk at the [That depends…]() workshop on the occasion of my viva at the University of Groningen.

  • The handout for this talk is available.

about

I’m Pavel Rudnev, and this is my personal website. I’m a research fellow and lecturer in linguistics at HSE University in Moscow. My main area of interest is syntax and its interfaces with sound and meaning. In particular, my current research revolves around the structure of nominal expressions, agreement, case and verbal morphosyntax in East Caucasian languages, and the syntax-to-phonology mapping in Russian Sign Language.

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