The syntax of negation and the licensing of negative polarity items in Hindi

This dissertation studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. First, it outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within that structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. Second, in addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, this dissertation outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. I present evidence to claim that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. In fact, the bulk of the evidence presented in this dissertation argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. Finally, with respect to the classification of NPIs, this dissertation also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice ‘any’ in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.