Negative concord as feature sharing

This paper takes up the long-standing questions on the nature of negative concord items (NCIs) in Southern Romance, with special reference to Italian. NCIs in Italian present two riddles for the theory of syntax and semantics, viz., the preverbal- postverbal asymmetry and the apparent semantic ambiguity. To untangle the NCI puzzle, this paper attempts to look into the internal structure of NCIs in Italian through their counterparts in Hungarian. The proposal will be framed under the assumption à la Pesetsky and Torrego (2007) that Agree should be viewed as a feature-sharing operation and feature interpretability and values should be separated from each other, Contra Chomsky (2001, 2004).