Overriding negative concord

Abstract

Negative concord languages require the presence of a sentence negator in clauses containing a negative quantifier. Chechen is a negative concord language, but overrides negative concord in certain question types: those with a polar question marker and those with an argument wh word. This paper describes Chechen’s behaviour using a context-sensitive markedness constraint derived from harmonically aligning an existing context-free one to a newly proposed question type hierarchy. This solution predicts that there may be other languages where different question types override negative concord.