High and low negation in Sign Language of the Netherlands

In this paper, we offer a formal account of clausal negation in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) based on corpus data. Data analysis reveals that NGT displays considerable variation in negative clauses with respect to (i) word order and (ii) spreading of the headshake. As for (i), we show that the different positions of the manual negator vis-à-vis the VP result from the presence of two NegPs which trigger V- or (remnant) VP-movement, which in turn allows different spell-out strategies. As for (ii), we argue that the proposed structure, while not syntactically determining the headshake’s spreading domain, does interact with spreading by defining which categories can host the headshake