The nature of restrictions on the expression of negation in Avar

I have recently presented my ongoing work on the syntactico-semantic properties of negation in Avar in the Andic seminar at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This was my first Russian-language presentation after a long lull.

In the talk, I argued that the rather idiosyncratic morphosyntactic properties of Avar negation, as well as the restrictions on the expression and interpretation of negation, can be accounted for in a framework postulating an ontological distinction between (sets of) events and (sets of) situations as conceptual underpinnings of the hierarchy of functional projections. In particular, I proposed that two negation strategies coëxist in Avar: a monoclausal one, familiar from better-studied languages, operates on non-past tense clauses, and the predicative one where the negation marker is essentially a copula which combines with a nominalised clause, expresses negation in the past tense.

The handout (in Russian) can be downloaded here.