A Semantic Analysis of Negative Concord

It is not uncommon in natural languages that negation seems to behave in an illogical manner. The general term for the many cases where multiple occurrences of morphologically negative constituents express a single semantic negation is negative concord (Labov 1979). Negative concord may take either of two forms: 1. the negative feature is ‘spread’ or distributed over any number of indefinite expressions within its scope; 2. a distinguished negative element shows up in all sentences that contain a negative expression. After den Besten (1986), we call these two types of concord negative spread and negative doubling, respectively. Languages may show either of them, none, or both. Patterns typical of negative spread and negative doubling are exemplified in (1) and (2) below, combinations of them are given in (3).