From polarity to reduplication in Gã

Abstract

There seems to be an intricate connection between reduplication of indefinite DPs and clausal negation in Gã; the reduplication is only permitted in the presence of negation. Thus, such reduplicated DPs can be construed as negative polarity items (NPIs). In this paper, I provide a detailed description of the facts about this phenomenon following what has been reported for NPIs elsewhere. I show that the patterns we observe exhibit typical properties of strong and strict NPIs. Subsequently, I propose how such indefinite DPs can be accounted for both in frameworks which see NPIs as resulting from a negatively-valued polarity feature e.g. Giannakidou (2000), and also frameworks which treat NPIs as resulting from NEG-raising, particularly Collins & Postal (2014)