On the quantificational force of Negative Sensitive Items in Turkish

Abstract

Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in natural languages can manifest in either existential or universal forms. The equivalence in truth conditions between ¬∃ and ∀¬ obscures their underlying semantic import, complicating efforts to determine the true nature of NSIs. This paper addresses this issue within the context of Turkish - an agglutinative head-final language - where surface syntactic cues are insufficient to directly diagnose scopal relations. Through a series of controlled configurations, I distinguish between the two interpretations by (i) constructing non-anti-additive contexts where existential and universal analyses make different predictions, (ii) isolating the semantic locus of negation, and (iii) examining NSIs in conjunction with other neg-sensitive expressions. The empirical findings indicate that Turkish NSIs are best analyzed as wide-scope universal quantifiers, rather than narrow-scope existentials. Additional support comes from their complementary distribution with ordinary universal quantifiers, a pattern that not only reinforces the wide-scope universal analysis but also sheds light on the distributional constraints affecting ordinary universals in Turkish.