Turkish negative polarity items and scope of negation revisited

Abstract

negation and other negative elements in Turkish. Unlike previous claims by Kelepir (2000; 2001), it is argued that the distribution of the NPI sakın 'ever' is not so restricted. In fact, its behavior is quite similar to that of other NPIs such as asla 'never' and katiyyen 'in no way' as they can all appear both in imperative and optative constructions. Moreover, contra Kelepir (2000; 2001) and McKenzie ،2006), it is shown that neither NPIs nor negation invoke any intervention effects in the environment of accusative-marked NPs. In that sense it does not seem necessary to posit the idea that the Immediate Scope Constraint holds in Turkish. Lastly, a small-scale online corpus search on the use of the ne... ne... phrase along with negation produced results that is in agreement with the account proposed Şener and !؟sever (2003). However, the results also illustrate the fact that negation only occurs when the ne... ne... phrase conjoins constituents smaller than clauses.