Syntactic negation in Ewe (Tongugbe) agent nominalizations

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from the scope patterns and the availability of negative polarity item (NPI) licensing of the negation marker ma‐, we show that NegP is realized in Ewe (Tongugbe) agentive nominals. We conclude that agentive nominals accommodate sentential negation, posing a challenge to previous assumptions. The implication of this work is that agent nominalizations can be more verb‐like than what has been reported in the literature. We further examine where the Ewe agentive suffix ‐lá resides in syntax based on the argument structure of the predicates realized inside agentive nominals.