Negation in Albanian: N-words

This article analyzes negative indefinites (n-words) in Albanian. These items include a prefixed element and an indefinite, and obligatorily require the occurrence of the negative marker NM. Complementarily, the indefinite element can occur alone in negative contexts. This distribution, specifically the types of negative doubling, is explained by assuming that the negative operator is not realized by a lexical constituent within the syntactic structure. The idea is that negation is postulated and made available to interpretation by the presence of NM and n-words. The Chomskyan notion of I-Merge and the lexical properties of n-words provide the crucial syntactic tools to connect doubling and other phenomena to the phasal Spell-out procedure.