Two Ways of Expressing Negation

In this paper I will show that whenever a language has a negative marker that is a syntactic head, this language exhibits Negative Concord (NC); languages that only exhibit Double Negation lack a negative head. I will argue that this is a major argument in favour of an analysis of NC in terms of syntactic agreement, since it proves that only NC languages have a syntactic category Neg. Moreover, I argue that this implies that n-words in Negative Concord languages cannot be regarded as semantically negative and that not in every language the negative marker itself is the phonological realization of a negative operator