Negation-Licensed Commands

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to argue for the existence and crosslinguistic stability of a phenomenon that I call “negation-licensed com-mands” (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.