The morphosyntax of negation in Kiswahili

This paper presents a description of sentential negation in Kiswahili and attempts a partial analysis of sentential negation in Kiswahili within the Principles and Parameters framework, in particular, following Pollock\''s (1989) proposal to split IP into several functional categories including NegP. The main claim is that negation mruking in Kiswahili is an instance of negation projection, NegP. The main evidence for this is found in relative clauses and conditional clauses where negation blocks I -to-C movement. The paper is organized into 5 sections. Basic theoretical assumptions are outlined in Section 1. Section 2 presents a description of the basic facts about four strategies of expressing sentential negation in Kiswahili and highlights problems that the data raise. Section 3 discusses the interaction between negation and relative marker. In Section 4, the location of NegP in IP is proposed. Section 5 presents some general conclusions and summarizes questions for further research