Negation, Imperatives, and Agreement in Coorgi

Abstract

This paper presents novel data from a severely understudied Dravidian language Coorgi showing that one of the negation morphemes in the language (-le negation) cannot occur with imperatives or with agreement. We show that another form of negation, -at, on the other hand, can occur with both. The paper explores possible reasons behind this pattern, and we propose that this distributional difference between -le and -at stems from a difference in their syntactic position. Namely, we argue that -le is head-negation (head of NegP), while -at is adjunct negation occupying an adjunct position (SpecVP). We show that this syntactic difference between the two types of negation in Coorgi places the observed patterns within a robust cross-linguistic generalization: negation is banned in imperative contexts in (some) languages where negation morphemes are syntactically heads, while negation is allowed in imperative contexts in languages where the negation morphemes are adjuncts (Zeijlstra 2004, Bos?kovic? 2004, 2012). We thus argue that the patterns of the distribution of negation in Coorgi is due to a cross-linguistically attested pattern of head Neg blocking Affix- Hopping. The proposed analysis provides an insight into another pattern of the distribution of negation in the language – namely, its cooccurrence or the lack thereof with agreement morphology.