The Position of NegP and Licensing N-words in Persian: A Distributed Morphology Approach

The syntactic expression of sentential negation has given rise to a lot of research in most linguistic frameworks. During the last few decades of research in generative grammar, studies on negation focus on a range of topics, including the position of Negation Phrase. Indeed, not only do languages vary with respect to the form of negative elements, but the underlying position of these functional elements is also subject to cross-linguistic variation. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994), the present study investigates the position of NegP in Farsi. Contrary to the claim in the literature, it will be argued - both on theoretical and empirical grounds - that in this language NegP immediately dominates TP and verbal elements absorb the functional head of Negation Phrase via a post-syntactic process, called morphological merger. Moreover, the syntax of negation is connected to the phenomenon of negative polarity, i.e. items whose distribution is limited to a number of negative contexts. So, this article examines the conditions which license the occurrence of N-phrases (N-words) in indicative structures. Clearly, studying N-phrases provides more insight not only into the nature of such context-sensitive elements, but also into the syntactic nature and position of sentential negation itself.