Resumen de Negation and imperatives

Olga Miseska Tomic

• While some languages have negative imperatives, others do not, and express prohibition through suppletive subjunctives or infinitives. The present paper argues that a language with negative imperatives projects a mood/modality phrase, ModP, which is c-commanded by Neg. In a language with no negative imperatives, however, ModP and NegP are fused.

  Within the South European languages there is a distinction with respect to the distinct projection of ModP: while the majority of the Romance languages do not project it, all the South Slavic languages do. Within South Slavic there is a parametric difference with respect to the strength of Neg, however. This difference is reflected in two distinct positionings of the clitics relative to the imperative verb: in the South Slavic languages with strong Neg the clitics are wedged between the negation operator and the imperative verb, while in the South Slavic languages with weak Neg they occur to the left of the verb.