The syntax of emphatic negation in Modern Irish

Abstract

In this paper I argue, following proposals by Laka (1990), Aboh (2010), De Clercq (2013; 2020a), and Greco (2019; 2020ab) among others, that negation has a dedicated position in the left periphery where it takes wide scope over the lower sentential material. This position is separate and independent from the TP-level PolP, and it can convey sentential negation on its own. As evidence for this, I present data from Modern Irish concerning an emphatic marker known as Demonic Negation from McCloskey (2009; 2018). I argue that this element is a true semantic negator rather than a metalinguistic negator, and that it is base generated in a polar projection immediately dominating FocP, independently from the lower positions where sentential negation is standardly encoded. This has a broader relevance for the general theory of the syntactic encoding of negation, since it demonstrates that negative markers can be base-generated in their highest scope position, and thus that they need not always originate in the VP-layer as proposed in recent research. Additionally, the possibility of raising a constituent to the SpecFocP to the right of the Demonic Negation is exploited to express scalar negation and Focus/constituent negation, bypassing the Irish restriction which prevents negation from being expressed below the inflectional layer (Acquaviva 1996).

Keywords

• emphatic negation
• cartography
• focus
• polarity
• Irish