Or, Wh- and Not: Free Choice and Polarity in Malagasy
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper explores the distribution of Free Choice Items (FCI) and Negative Polarity Items (NPI) in Malagasy. Both FCIs and NPIs in Malagasy are syntactically complex: they are expressed by disjunctions of wh-words. It is shown that this morphosyntactic structure directly reflects their semantics. In other words, FCIs and NPIs are semantically as well as syntactically disjunctive. Moreover, the Malagasy data support analyses of disjunction as a polarity sensitive element.
منابع مشابه
Disjunction in Free Choice and Polarity in Malagasy
The examples in (1) show that Malagasy uses the same item for both FCIs and NPIs. This overlap is not unusual – consider English any (see Haspelmath 1997 for several other examples). What is striking about the Malagasy data, however, is that FCIs and NPIs are made up of a wh-element (e.g. inona ‘what’) and the disjunctive morpheme na. Thus the Malagasy equivalent of anyone is literally or who o...
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تاریخ انتشار 2005