Expletive-free, concord-free semantics for Russian ni-words

Abstract

The paper presents a puzzle about the licensing of the NPI bisyndetic coordinator ni... ni in Russian: being in many respects similar to other Russian NPIs with ni-as prefix, it does not require negation to be present when it conjoins VPs. Starting with the hypothesis that the semantics of ni- remains constant across different uses, I adapt the mechanism of NPI licensing proposed by Chierchia [2] to the needs of the puzzle. The central idea of the proposal is that a token of ni splits the composition process into two processes running in parallel until the null operator licensing NPIs unites them back. Negation, whenever present, affects only one of those processes, whose result is then checked by the null operator.