Negative Concord in Polish

Adam Przepiórkowski and Anna Kupsc

Technical Report 828, IPI PAN (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences), 1997.


In this report, we present a formal, explicit and exhaustive analysis of Negative Concord in Polish. We analyse Negative Concord as an unbounded dependency showing that it can cross an arbitrary number of phrasal boundaries, although it also exhibits island constraints typical of unbounded dependencies. We also investigate exceptional behaviour of both Negative Concord and so-called Genitive of Negation in the context of verb clusters and, on the basis of this behaviour, argue for a flat structure of verb clusters in the absence of verbal negation, and for a hierarchical structure when some of the verbs in the cluster are negated. We formalize our analysis in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammatical theory. The degree of formalization achieved makes the account immediately computer-implementable.


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BibTeX entry:

@TechReport{prz:kup:97a,
  author =       "Adam Przepi{\'o}rkowski and Anna Kup{\'s}{\'c}",
  title =        "Negative Concord in {P}olish",
  number =       828,
  year =         1997,
  month =        feb,
  institution =  "Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences"}

Creation Date: Friday, November 28, 1997
Last Modified: Sun Jan 15 15:05:29 CET 2006

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