Adelaide Banafo
(CRC 1629, Project B03)

will talk about

Exhaustification over existential bases of Negative Indefinites in some Ghanaian languages

January 19, 2026
16.15-17.45

IG 3.201
or on zoom (please contact Manfred Sailer for the link)

Abstract:
The expression of negative indefinites across African languages exhibits substantial typological variation, particularly in their interaction with sentential negation, scope relations, and polarity sensitivity. This study compares Buli, Dagbani (Mabia), Ga and Akan (Kwa), showing that despite surface variation, these languages share a core existential semantics for their negative indefinites. I propose that the apparent diversity in form, whether reduplicated existentials or universal-like items, is a morphological reflex of the exhaustification operator (O) over an existential base in the computation of meaning (Chierchia 2013). This perspective departs from purely pragmatic accounts, situating the variation within the grammar itself, following a feature-driven model of scalar and domain alternatives.

Everyone interested is welcome!