Capturing expletive negation with complex left branches

Abstract In this paper, we examine the cross-linguistic syncretisms between markers of negation and ‘expletive negation’ ( exn ), i.e., a formal instance of negation lacking negative meaning, in fear -clauses. We argue that these syncretisms reflect structural proximity to the negative functional sequence (cf. De Clercq (2020) and Baunaz & Lander (2023) ) and that exn realises a high, epistemic modal feature (cf. Makri (2013) and Tsiakmakis & Espinal (2022) for Modern Greek). We then explain how the syncretisms can be captured in a uniform way. For this, we adopt the Nanosyntactic model of lexicalisation (cf. De Clercq et al. 2025 ), and so-called stored ‘complex left branches’ (cf. De Clercq 2019 ). Ultimately, we show that, under the assumption that exn is modal, all patterns can be accounted for by varying the shapes of lexical items, while keeping everything else equal.