Negative Indefinites and Negative Concord

Negative indefinites likenobodyandnothingare traditionally analyzed as negative quantifiers. The crosslinguistic validity of this analysis is challenged by the phenomenon of negative concord, where negative indefinites co‐occur with other items expressing negation in the same clause and nevertheless the meaning of the sentence involves only one negation. After giving a short overview of the main patterns of negative concord, this chapter critically discusses the most influential approaches. The first type of analysis assumes that negative indefinites in negative concord languages are lexically ambiguous between inherently negative quantifiers and nonnegative indefinites. The second type of approach maintains the standard analysis of negative indefinites as negative quantifiers. The third line of approach holds that negative indefinites in negative concord languages are semantically nonnegative. These approaches either assume that negative indefinites in negative concord languages are negative polarity items or analyze the relation between negative indefinites and sentential negation as a form of syntactic agreement.