Negative polarity, scope of negation and negative phrases in Turkish

Abstract

This paper investigates a number of issues regarding negative polarity items (NPIs henceforth), the scope of negation and other negative elements in Turkish. First, based on new data, I argue that the distribution of the adverbial NPI sakın 'ever' is not as restricted as it was claimed in previous work (cf. Kelepir 2000, 2001). That’s, its behavior is quite similar to that of other adverbial NPIs such as asla 'never' and katiyyen 'in no way' in the language. Second, in contrast to the some claims made by Kelepir (2000, 2001), I show that neither NPIs nor negation invoke any intervention effects in the environment of Noun Phrases (NPs). Thus I argue that it is not necessary to posit the Immediate Scope Constraint in Turkish. Lastly, I investigate the interaction between the ne... ne... phrase (i.e. neither… nor…) and negation in Turkish. More specifically, a small-scale online corpus research on the use of the ne... ne... phrase along with negation produced results that are in agreement with the account proposed by Şener and İşsever (2003). However, the results also illustrate the fact that negation occurs only when the ne... ne... phrase conjoins constituents smaller than clauses.