Exceptionally optional negative concord with Turkish neither...nor

Abstract

This paper presents a novel account for the optionality of negative concord observed with neither...nor coordinations, in an otherwise strict negative concord language—Turkish. I argue that the apparently optional negative concord is a surface phenomenon that can be traced back to a structural ambiguity arising from the type-flexibility of coordination operators. The semantic type of the coordination affects its syntactic position relative to the Turkish NegP, which results in different surface facts: whenever the neither...nor coordination is of a generalized quantifier type, it originates in the vP below the NegP, akin to other negative concord items like nobody, triggering negative concord with sentential negation; whenever it is a propositional coordination, it contains the NegP position, and there is no negative concord. We can account for this exceptionally optional negative concord phenomenon by seamlessly importing these facts into an existing negative concord architecture (Zeijlstra 2004, 2012), with no significant modifications. This reductionist analysis contrasts with alternative approaches that explain optionality by adding complexity to the mechanics of the negative concord system (Şener and İşsever 2003 for Turkish; Szabolcsi 2018a for Hungarian). Finally, this account crucially relies on a theory of coordination operators as type-flexible, and therefore contributes an argument against a view of coordinators as having a rigid propositional type (Hirsch 2017; Schein 2017).