Reconsidering non-negative contexts as a diagnostic for negative concord

Non-negative contexts are often used as a diagnostic for negative concord items, the claim being specifically that these contexts are not suitable hosts for negative concord items. We present an in-depth empirical investigation of how a single polarity sensitive item behaves under negation as compared to in non-negative contexts. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed investigation of its kind. The item we focus on is Turkish kimse ‘anyone’, and beyond the fact that kimse can appear in non-negative contexts, it otherwise behaves as a negative concord item. The evidence we collected shows, on balance, that kimse has highly parallel behavior across these contexts. We conclude there is no significant difference across contexts, and thus that in principle negative concord items can be licensed in non-negative contexts. Accordingly, the ability of a polarity sensitive item to appear in a non-negative context cannot be a valid cross-linguistic diagnostic for negative concord items.