The Distribution and Interpretation of Welsh N-Words

Like many languages, Welsh has a set of n-words, nominal or adverbial elements which seem to be semantically negative. There is a variety of evidence that these elements are indeed semantically negative. However, a sentence with two n-words may have a single negation interpretation. Unlike their English counterparts, Welsh n-words have a restricted distribution, being excluded from certain contexts and licensed in various others. A storage-based analysis of the kind that has been developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) can provide an illuminating account of this data. The analysis involves two main ideas: (a) that negative elements can only have certain clausal constituents as their scope, and (b) that a sentence with two negative elements can have a single negation interpretation if and only if they have the same scope.