Russian nibud'-indefinites and Neg-Raising

Типология морфосинтаксических параметров. 2022. Vol. 5. No. 1. P. 72–90.

Denis Pisarenko

This paper discusses the phenomenon of ambiguous interpretation of Russian nibud’-indefinites in Neg-Raising contexts. There are two major approaches to Neg-Raising: the syntactic approach which considers it an instance of the syntactic process of raising and the pragmatic approach which takes it as a result of pragma-semantic processes happening to NegRaising predicates. In this work I argue for the compromise approach which admits that both models of establishing of Neg-Raising inference co-exist in language. I assume that the ambiguous reading of the sentences including a nibud’-indefinite with double negation arises since there are two ways of yielding the Neg-Raising inference.

Keywords: negation, formal semantics, formal pragmatics, Indefinites, Neg-Raising