Negation and participant deverbal nominalisations in Spanish

In this article the behaviour of participant deverbal nominalisations preceded by the negative particle no in Spanish is addressed. It is concluded that these nouns are compatible with no and that, in this context, two interpretations can arise: the (non-)belonging to a group reading and the non-prototypicality reading. With the former the presence of negation entails the creation of two opposed sets of entities, so that a participant that falls into one set is necessarily excluded from the other set; with the latter, the participant is evaluated as a bad exemplar of the class it belongs to, given that it lacks (some of) the properties considered prototypical. Finally, a syntactic analysis that accounts for the availability of these two readings is proposed. This analysis is primarily based on the interaction of negation with certain nominal projections that make up the syntactic configuration of nouns.