NI- AND NI... NI IN RUSSIAN: DISTRIBUTION AND LICENSING CONDITIONS

The paper deals with the distribution of the Russian NPI coordinator ni... ni ‘(n)either... (n)or’ insofar as some intricacies of its distribution and interpretation have escaped the attention of previous researchers. Its various uses suggest different conclusions as regards its force and licensing conditions, the prominent options being that it is a conjunction licensed above negation and that it is a disjunction licensed under negation. Similar items in other languages, such as English and SerBo-Croatian, have been recently analysed as disjunctive, but the evidence presented here suggests that at least for some speakers, ni... ni has a conjunctive effect and therefore should be assumed to scope over negation at LF. We develop an analysis under which ni... ni is doubly licensed, first as a Negative Concord item [Zeijlstra 2004] under negation and then as an item triggering domain alternatives [Chierchia 2013] which has to move above negation lest the truth conditions of the sentence be self- contradictory. Our analysis is then shown to have the potential to assimilate the seemingly exceptional cases where ni... ni is licensed in the absence of the negative particle ne to more regular cases.