Adam Przepiorkowski, Anna Kupsc

Negative Concord in Polish

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Abstract

In this report, we present a formal, explicit and exhaustive analysis of Negative Concord in Polish. We analyse Negative Concord as an unbounded dependency showing that it can cross an arbitrary number of phrasal boundaries, although it also exhibits island constraints typical of unbounded dependencies. We also investigate exceptional behaviour of both Negative Concord and so-called Genitive of Negation in the context of verb clusters and, on the basis of this behaviour, argue for a flat structure of verb clusters in the absence of verbal negation, and for a hierarchical structure when some of the verbs in the cluster are negated. We formalize our analysis in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammatical theory. The degree of formalization achieved makes the account immediately computer-implementable.

Key words: formal grammars, HPSG, negative concord, n-words, genitive of negation, unbounded dependency constructions, complex predicates.