On development of the negative phrase in Ossetic
David ErschlerAbstract
The Modern Ossetic languages exhibit a typologically uncommon pattern of negative concord — a combination of obligatory negative spread and obligatory movement of Neg-phrases into an immediately preverbal position. I argue that this system developed historically from a fairly common phenomenon, the preverbal placement of focus. Contacts with South Caucasian languages, Georgian and Svan, must have played a crucial role in the emergence of this system. I propose a specific development scenario, according to which the negative movement is diachronically related to focusing, whereas the negative spread is an outcome of the fact that the negation markers got reanalyzed into the negative prefixes on wh-items.