On the absence of exceptionally optional negative concord in Turkish

Abstract It has been proposed in recent theoretical analyses that there are at least two types of Negative Concord Items (NCIs henceforth) in Turkish. According to this view, the first type includes typical NCIs such as hiç kimse ‘no one/anyone’, hiçbir şey ‘nothing/anything’ and asla ‘never’ that require the presence of sentential negation - mA in the structure at all times. These elements were shown to exhibit strict Negative Concord (NC) behavior and were semantically classified as generalized quantifiers. On the other hand, the second type of NCIs was claimed to involve such elements as the negative coordinator ne…ne… ‘neither…nor…’ that was argued to display exceptionally optional negative concord. The reason for this claim is that ne…ne… has various characteristics in terms of its meaning that are observed in various syntactic environments. More specifically, it was proposed that it can optionally co-occur with sentential negation, and therefore exhibits exceptionally optional negative concord in the language. In this paper, I shall demonstrate, however, that ne…ne… is in fact not an NCI and it is a linguistic element that has its own negative semantics. Specifically, it does not need the presence of negation regardless of whether negation appears overtly or covertly in the structure. In other words, ne…ne… does not actually appear in NC environments and the presence of sentential negation along with the coordinator is due to reasons orthogonal to its inherent characteristics. In that sense, the account proposed here is in line with those analyses where the co-occurrence of sentential negation along with the negative coordinator is accounted for through other phenomena.