Deriving the restrictions on the expression and interpretation of negation in Avar

Павел Руднев выступил с докладом на семинаре лингвистической лаборатории ЦФИ

Руднев Павел Владимирович

In this talk, I discuss two strategies of expressing sentential negation in Avar. I argue that  the restrictions on the expression and interpretation of negation can be accounted for in a framework postulating an ontological distinction between (sets of) events and (sets of) situations as conceptual underpinnings of the hierarchy of functional projections. In particular, I propose that two negation strategies coëxist in Avar: a monoclausal one, familiar from better-studied languages, operates on non-past tense clauses, and the predicative one where the negation marker is essentially a copula which combines with a nominalised clause, expresses negation in the past tense.