On the quantificational force of Negative Sensitive Items in Turkish

Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in natural languages can manifest in either existential or universal forms. The equivalence in truth conditions between ¬∃ and ∀¬ obscures their underlying semantic import, complicating efforts to determine the true nature of NSIs. This paper addresses this issue within the context of Turkish - an agglutinative head-final language - where surface syntactic cues are insufficient to directly diagnose scopal relations. Through a series of controlled configurations, I distinguish between the two interpretations by (i) constructing non-anti-additive contexts where existential and universal analyses make different predictions, (ii) isolating the semantic locus of negation, and (iii) examining NSIs in conjunction with other neg-sensitive expressions. The empirical findings indicate that Turkish NSIs are best analyzed as wide-scope universal quantifiers, rather than narrow-scope existentials. Additional support comes from their complementary distribution with ordinary universal quantifiers, a pattern that not only reinforces the wide-scope universal analysis but also sheds light on the distributional constraints affecting ordinary universals in Turkish.