The main goal of this article is to argue for the existence and crosslinguistic stability of a phenomenon that I call “negation-licensed commands” (NLCs), in which commands can be interpreted as such only in the presence of negation. The article explores morphosyntactic properties of NLCs in a small number of unrelated languages. It stops short of an analysis of the phenomenon, which will have to await future research.

commands, negation, imperative, permission, modality
© 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2020
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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