Syntax of reduplication and negative-polarity items in Buli

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5252

Keywords:

negative polarity item, negative concord item, DP, reduplication, noun class, Mabia/Gur languages

Abstract

Negative-polarity items in Buli, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in Ghana, exhibit a mixed behavior between NCIs and NPIs (or between strong NPIs and weak NPIs). Thus, Buli presents a counterexample to Vallduvı's generalization that negative-polarity items come in two kinds. Adopting and extending the framework of Collins & Postal (2014) and Collins et al. (2017), we will show that the apparently mysterious mixed behavior of negative-polarity items in Buli can be explained by articulating an unary-NEG structure and syntax of reduplication.

Downloads

Published

2022-05-05

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2022): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Hiraiwa, Ken, and George Akanlig-Pare. 2022. “Syntax of Reduplication and Negative-Polarity Items in Buli”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 7 (1): 5252. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5252.