N-Words and Negative Heads in Russian

It is standardly assumed that Russian negative concord (NC) items or n-words (the series consisting of the morpheme ni and a wh-stem) require sentential negation (SN) ne for their licensing (1). (1) Ja nikogo *(ne) znaju. I n-who NEG know √NC: ‘I don’t know anybody’ / *DN: ‘I know somebody.’ Brown (1999) analyzes the most common case of Russian NC as feature checking: n-words carry an uninterpretable NEG feature that is checked against the interpretable NEG feature of SN (2). (2) [PolP nikogoi [Pol ’ ne … ti]] (Brown 1999) uFNEG iFNEG Nevertheless, under certain circumstances n-words can also occur in sentences without SN (see Progovac 2005, though the distribution of freestanding n-words in Serbo-Croatian and Russian is quite different), which is problematic for analyses that postulate a feature checking relation between SN and an n-word. I give a novel generalization that Russian n-words occur without SN in small clause (SC) predicates (3a) and as complements of prepositions (3b, c). The PP