Reaffirming Māori negatives as verbs

Abstract

Generative syntacticians often assume that sentential negatives in all languages are the content of a functional head Neg. Although negatives in many languages are amenable to such an analysis, negatives in certain Polynesian languages are not. This chapter first reviews the evidence presented by Hohepa (1969) and others that sentential negatives in Māori are lexical heads, either intransitive verbs or adjectives, which are the main predicate of a clause that excludes the negated clause. It then explores the question of why Māori negatives should differ from the crosslinguistic norm. The answer that is proposed appeals to syntactic-semantic typology and Māori prosody, and engages with the larger issue of how lexical and functional heads are realized in Polynesian languages.