Locality of intra-clausal negative concord in Russian: a comparison with other non-local syntactic processes

The paper is devoted to locality restrictions imposed on several intraclausal non-local interactions in Russian, such as negative concord (licensing of negative pronouns by sentential negation), licensing of polarity-sensitive indefinite pronouns with the particles -libo and -nibud’, anaphor binding (binding of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns by their antecedents), and instances of wh-movement seen in constituent questions and relative
clauses. We investigate which of these processes (if any) may cross the boundaries of the following types of constituents: argumental noun phrases and prepositional phrases, nominal and prepositional adjuncts, predicative adjective phrases, attributive adjective phrases and participial phrases, and converb phrases. The rationale is that, if negative concord is to be reduced to some other long-distance syntactic process (as has been proposed in the literature), we expect the locality restrictions obeyed by negative concord to be more or less identical to the restrictions that the other long-distance process in question is subject to. We demonstrate that, among all of these syntactic processes, it is wh-movement which is most similar to negative concord with respect to its locality restrictions. Given that the parallelism is nevertheless imperfect (at least for some speakers, who do not allow for subextraction of wh-pronouns out of argumental nominal and prepositional phrases, while permitting negative concord to cross their boundaries), a possible formalization of our findings is proposed, which makes use of the notion of a probe’s horizon.