Blocking Effects in Negative Dependency: The Scope of Universals

This paper is concerned with the empirically diverse behavior of universal quantifiers, and specifically investigates why they cannot scope over negation in Negative Concord (NC) languages (Zeijlstra 2004) and Turkish (Kelepir 2001). I argue that the lack of wide-scope construal of universals in these languages can be attributed to the same underlying cause, viz. blocking effects adumbrated by Giannakidou (2000). The main claim is that universals in these languages cannot be interpreted outside of the scope of negation because they have neg-words at their disposal, expressions that are universal quantifiers specified to outscope negation. By virtue of having identical semantic import and overlapping distribution, they are in competition for insertion: whenever the licensing conditions of neg-words are satisfied, they are inserted at the expense of ordinary universals. The latter thus appear only in "elsewhere" contexts, where neg-words cannot be used, often with intervening operators. I further show how the blocking-based account fares better than alternative approaches.