On the typology of negative concord

This paper has three main points. First, contrary to what is often stated, negative concord is not all that frequent and certainly not the most frequent strategy to express single clausal negation in a clause with an indefinite noun phrase or adverbial in the scope of the negation. Second, the subtype of negative concord called ‘strict negative concord’ is much more frequent than the subtype of ‘non-strict negative concord’. These two claims are based on a worldwide sample of 179 languages. Third, it is argued that non-strict negative concord shows too much variation for it to be seen as the one choice of a two-way split between strict and non-strict negative concord. Given the relative rarity of non-strict negative concord, this claim is not based on the worldwide sample, but on a survey of the research literature.