Gréte Dalmi, Jacek Witkoś & Piotr Cegłowski (eds.), Strict negative concord in Slavic and Finno-Ugric: Licensing, structure and interpretation. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2024.

This volume combines extensive empirical coverage with advanced theoretical analysis.It covers an impressive number of languages, including endangered ones, and spans methodology from elicitation and corpus studies to experimental work.The contributions also encompass various theoretical issues regarding Negative Concord (NC): What is the syntax of negation in NC languages?What distinguishes Negative Concord Items (NCIs) and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs)?What makes a phrase an NCI?What is the locality profile of NC?This volume brings us one step closer to answering these questions.In Chapter 1, the editors introduce the volume by reviewing theoretical approaches to the crucial issues that have been raised with respect to NC.Firstly, the status of negative (concord) items, often called neg-words in the NC literature.There are two sub-issues here: (i) whether the negative items are semantically negative, or just have to be licensed by the negative operator like NPIs; (ii) whether, again like NPIs, they are a kind of indefinite in the scope of negation, or if they have universal quantificational force.After the discussion of earlier approaches, the chapter turns to the treatment of neg-words as non-negative items, which is the more widespread view nowadays.Though this is a discussion of the neg items' semantic properties, it has direct consequences for narrow syntax.As outlined in Chapter 1, and amply illustrated in other contributions of the volume (Chapter 2 for East Slavic languages, Chapter 4 for Czech, Chapter 5 for Slovenian, Chapter 6 for Vepsian, Chapter 8 for Meadow Mari), neg-words in NC are not parallel to NPIs: they show a different distribution.The lack of semantic negativity together with the insufficiency of a semantic account (i.e., treatment along with NPIs) are the motivations behind the syntactic approach to NC (Zeijlstra 2004) that is presented in Chapter 1.In this framework, NC is modeled through Agree: the neg-item bears an uninterpretable [uNeg] feature that needs to be checked against the interpretable [iNeg] feature on the negative operator.A typological matter that this theory aims to account for is the split of NC languages into strict and non-strict NC.In strict NC, all neg-words need a negative marker in order to be licensed.In non-strict NC, post-verbal neg-words also require licensing, while preverbal neg-words do not, and can license the post-verbal neg-words themselves.In Zeijlstra's theory, this variation comes down to whether the negative marker bears 1