Negation and Negative Polarity Items in Tigrinya

In this study, we discuss negation, negative polarity items (NPIs), and their syntactic constraints in Tigrinya, an understudied Semitic language. We obtained data through elicitations with two male L1 speakers of the language who lived in Ethiopia and Eritrea before moving to the Atlanta area in the early 2000s. Using this data, we explore the different types of locality conditions in which negative polarity items appear, an NPI’s relationship with its most basic licensor (negation), as well as how these NPIs perform when transferred to other contexts. Throughout this paper, we draw comparisons across polarity items in other Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Berber and Jordanian Arabic (Ouali 2014, Overfelt 2009, Alsarayreh 2012). We argue that adverbial NPIs such as /fets’imu/ are licensed strictly by the Spec-Head relation, while nominal NPIs such as /walla Hanti/ are licensed through the c-command constraint. Finally, a proposed analysis of the idiomatic NPI /k'ejjaH santim/ demonstrates that NPI-licensing in Tigrinya can occur across relative clause boundaries.