Locations and situations: Negation and finiteness in Avar

February 7, 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.

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

This is a talk at TiN-Dag 2015, the annual general linguistics conference of the Dutch Linguistics Association.

  • The handout for this talk is available.

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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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