NEGATIVE CONCORD ITEMS INSIDE ADJECTIVE PHRASES: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Constraints on distribution of negative concord items (NCIs) in Russian have been by and large formulated in terms of transparency or impenetrability of diff erent types of clause boundaries for NCI licensing, whereas opacity of non-clausal constituents has not been systematically investigated. The present article attempts to partially fi ll in this gap by an experimental study of the conditions necessary for licensing of an NCI contained within an adjective phrase (AdjP) by sentential negation. The results of our experiment demonstrate that such licensing is possible if the AdjP in question is a predicate, while it is impossible if the AdjP is an adjunct modifying a nominal. We discuss a possible formalization for this discrepancy as well as the ramifi cations of our results for an analysis of long-form predicative adjectives in Russian. The results we obtained may be an additional counterargument against the approach taking long-form predicative adjectives to be underlyingly modifi ers of unpronounced nominal heads, since on such an analysis the ability of long-form predicative adjectives (in contradistinction to attributive ones) to have their NCI complements licensed by sentential negation would be entirely unaccounted for.