Alina Sementsova

RTG PhD student associate, member since 2024

Project "Negative scope mismatches in coordination"

Inspiration for this work was found in Szabolcsi & Haddican (2004), who investigate sentences where a negation c-commands a coordinated DP. According to their findings, languages differ with respect to scope of the coordinator (conjunction and disjunction). Namely, they propose two types of language groups with respect to the interaction between scope and negation: English-type languages, where negation can outscope conjunction, and Hungarian-type languages, where negation does not have this property.
This research is offering a comparative investigation of how we can explain similarities and interactions between negation and other grammatical categories. In particular, we are going to look at the similar pattern in other languages and see whether they keep to the hypothesis of Szabolcsi & Haddican (2004) and whether it is possible to broaden their findings.

Supervisors: Hedde Zeijlstra , Katharina Hartmann