Negative Concord Item in Azeri Turkic

In this research Azeri negative sentences are scrutinized with a focus on Negative Concord Item (NCI) s. Linguists such asEnç (1998), Kornfilt (1997) and Progovac (2005) assert that Turkish and Azeri lack Negative Concord Item but we put forward a claim in the contrary. Our purpose is to prove the existence of NCI in Azeri Turkic. This paper includes an introduction to Negative markers and specification of NegP in Azeri sentences. Then, using arguments like Negative Concept, Zanuttini's (1991) generalization and Valduvi's (1994) and Gianakidou's (2000) tests, we argue that Azeri Turkic has NCI. After that, we deal with the licensing of NCIs. In addition to proving the existence of NCI in Azeri, we argue that due to the syntactic behavior of NCIs in interrogative contexts in Azeri Turkic as in some other languages, another criterion must be added to Valduvi's (1994) and Gianakidou's (2000) tests, according to which, the question particles can also license NCIs.