"Expletive Negation" in Russian: A Conspiracy Theory

In this paper I provide a new analysis of so called "expletive negation" in Russian. Brown and Franks (1995) discovered that negation sometimes licenses the genitive of negation while being unable to license a particular class of negative concord items, ni-phrases like nikto 'nobody'. In the present paper I show that the assumption made in the literature according to which "expletive negation" lacks negative force or is semantically vacuous is not well grounded. "Expletive negation" is semantically real negation; it just occupies an unusually high clausal position. The asymmetry between the genitive of negation on the one hand and ni-phrases on the other hand is explained in terms of locality. The investigation yields a number of further results. Genitive of negation is structural Case and susceptible to Relativized Minimality. Ni-phrases are analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifiers, whose movement is constrained in ways typical of quantifier raising.