Negative Concord and Sentential Negation in Gallo

Overview & Synopsis

The goal of this paper is to get a better understanding of Negative Concord (NC) in natural language through the study of Gallo, a Romance language spoken in Brittany. Despite obvious similarities with respect to Standard French, Gallo differs from it by integrating sentential negation pâ/pouin 'not' to the NC system. We will first show that previous analyses of the phenomenon based on specific properties of n-words (Déprez (2003, to appear), Zeijlstra (2010)) fail to account for properties of NC in Gallo, and then argue for an alternative approach (inspired from Muller (2010), and Homer (2013)), based on specific properties of the sentential negation itself. We will finally propose an account for inter/intra-individual microvariation in the NC system of Gallo.