Negation in Swedish: where it's not at

Christensen (1986) noted that negative quantifiers in the Scandinavian languages have an unusual distribution that suggests some interesting syntactic properties. More recently, Kayne (1998) and Platzack (1998) have taken the Scandinavian data to present evidence for a positive licensing condition on negative quantifiers, to the effect that they must be in the Specifier of a NegP. Illustrating with data from Swedish, I will discuss the structural positions of negation and of negative quantifiers, and show that the right generalization for their positions is in fact a negative one: in a clause articulated into CP-IP-VP structure, these negative elements cannot appear within VP. I will also discuss how this characterization can be neatly modelled in a base-generated theory like LFG, and adopt a realizational approach to the analysis of negation. Finally, I will discuss an extension of the analysis to negative concord languages.