Negative sensitive items (NSIs) have been the subject of much discussion in the syntactic as well as semantic literature for at least the last forty years since the publication of Ladusaw’s (Reference Ladusaw1980) seminal work. The subject particularly is of great significance as it has consequences on topics including the syntactic and semantic composition of indefinites, the nature and locus of negation, how semantic domains are further restricted by syntactic constraints (i.e. the division of labor between syntax and semantics in licensing), and the domain of application of Agree and Merge as primitive syntactic operations, to mention a few. This book contributes to the growing body of literature on the issue by presenting interesting and new empirical facts from an understudied language, namely Arabic.

One of the challenges to any researcher working on the topic of NSIs in Arabic is the scarcity of data, especially because Arabic encompasses many varieties so different that they are often described as different languages. Although there is much work on NSIs in Romance and other Indo-European languages, one can hardly find any serious work that presents the landscape of NSIs in (the major varieties of) Arabic. Chapter 2, ‘Classification of PSIs and their lexical categories’, walks the reader through all categories of NSIs from different varieties of Arabic, including Egyptian, Moroccan, Jordanian, Qatari, and Standard. As with other languages, Arabic has two major classes of NSIs: negative polarity items (NPIs) and negative indefinites (NIs). The latter can also include elements that can be construed as negative concord items (NCIs). Perhaps of great interest is the fact that Arabic exhibits elements that contribute a negative interpretation in absence of overt negation, such as NCIs in preverbal position ( Wala ħada idʒa ‘No one came.’) and NCIs in fragment answers (A: Miin idʒa? ‘Who came?’ B: Wala ħada! ‘No one!’). These elements pose a challenge to previous work and motivate a new analysis that departs from restricting licensing to c-command in the domain of a negative marker (NM).

A point of strength of the empirical part of this monograph is the richness of data sources. In particular, Alqassas hinges on introspection for the data drawn from his own dialect (Jordanian), cited examples from the other colloquial varieties, and corpus data for the standard variety (Qur’an corpus). The issue of reliability of data is becoming more central to linguistic theorizing and there is a growing tendency in linguistic research to use different sources for data collection to guarantee that the research is built on a solid empirical ground. For instance, more researchers are conducting large-scale online surveys using crowdsourcing websites to ensure that the samples of their research are representative (see e.g. Bruening & Al Khalaf Reference Bruening and Al Khalaf2018 for English; Al Khalaf Reference Al Khalaf2022a, Reference Al Khalafb for Arabic).

The issue of licensing is central to any serious work on NSIs (e.g. Giannakidou Reference Giannakidou, von Heusinger, Maienborn and Portner2011). There has been much debate on the nature of licensing: is licensing purely semantic, purely syntactic, or hybrid? Even within syntactic analyses of licensing, the question remains which syntactic configuration(s) or operation(s) are involved in licensing, whether a precedence relation between the NPI and negation plays a role in licensing, and whether licensing occurs in the narrow syntax or at LF. All these interesting issues are addressed in Chapter 3, ‘Licensing negative polarity items’. Alqassas argues for a syntactic analysis, though he does not explicitly deny the role of semantics in defining the domains in which certain subclasses of NPIs may appear (as argued in Giannakidou Reference Giannakidou, von Heusinger, Maienborn and Portner2011; Al Khalaf Reference Al Khalaf2017). Alqassas shows that there is much variation in NPI licensing among the various Arabic dialects studied in the monograph. This variation stems from the nature of NPIs, their loci relative to negation, and the nature (whether bipartite or non-bipartite) and locus of negation itself. It is argued that postverbal NPIs are licensed via c-command, preverbal NPIs via a spec-head relation, and preverbal idiomatic NPIs via reconstruction at LF (see Giannakidou Reference Giannakidou1998).

A major question in syntax is whether negation projects its own phrase and whether it may appear in different loci within the same language (multi-locus view) or just in one locus (uni-locus view) (see Zeijlstra Reference Zeijlstra2004). A central issue highlighted in Chapter 3, ‘Licensing negative polarity items’, is an empirical piece of evidence for the existence of two different negatives in Arabic. More specifically, Alqassas notes that preverbal NPIs cannot co-occur with enclitic negation (-iš) as in *ʕumr-ha ma-katbat-iš riwaaye ‘She has never written a novel’, which is a puzzling fact. He argues that this fact provides evidence that Arabic has a multi-locus negation; that is, negation is projected above TP where it binds the time variable of tense and it is projected below T above vP (bipartite negation ma…-iš), where it binds the event variable of the verb. This fact explains why preverbal NPIs cannot co-occur with enclitic negation: they can only be licensed by clausal negation.

Negative concord is strongly tied to negative polarity and has equally received much attention in the literature (e.g. Zeijlstra Reference Zeijlstra2004; Penka Reference Penka2011). Determining which elements should be identified as NCIs is a challenge, especially in a language like Arabic, which, as mentioned earlier, suffers from the scarcity of published empirical evidence. In the literature on natural languages more generally, a central question in the syntax and semantics of NC is to determine the conditions and operations that explain when a concordant reading is available and when a double-negation reading is enforced where two apparently negative elements appear in the structure. In Chapter 4, ‘Licensing negative concord items’, Alqassas presents a detailed analysis of licensing of NCIs in Arabic. Building on Zeijlstra (Reference Zeijlstra2004), he adopts an agreement analysis. The basic idea is that a NCI carries an uninterpretable negative feature [uneg] that must be checked (via Agree) with an element carrying an interpretable negative feature [ineg] which could be a NM or a NI. This proposal is significant and contributes to the literature that argues that licensing of NSIs occurs in the syntax and is derived from the syntactic as well as the semantic features of NSIs and NMs. The agreement approach advanced here explains the micro-variation in NC licensing in Arabic varieties, where the availability of a concordant reading or the lack thereof hinges on the nature of NIs and their featural composition, on the one hand, and on whether a language allows multiple Agree (and if it does whether multiple Agree is optional or obligatory) on the other hand. A detailed and neat typology of these features is tabulated with a comparison with the most studied languages in this respect.

The second half of Chapter 4, ‘Licensing negative concord items’, is dedicated to the issue of licensing of disjunction phrases, where a disjunction operator (walla) behaves on par with NCIs. The empirical facts presented have not been introduced by any work I am aware of before and are in themselves a contribution to the literature on NSIs in particular and the literature on coordination/disjunction more generally (see Al Khalaf Reference Al Khalaf2015, Reference Al Khalaf2018 on coordination in Arabic). Again, an excellent agreement analysis of how this element is licensed is presented and a discussion of the nature of laa… wala ‘neither… nor’ construction is discussed, showing that laa, which appears to be semantically negative is in fact semantically vacuous, calling for some other element (overt or covert) to license the NCI walla. The discussion enriches our understanding of the composition of the structure of coordination/disjunction (see e.g. Bruening & Al Khalaf Reference Bruening and Al Khalaf2020 for a recent perspective) as well as the semantics of disjunction operators.

A significant contribution in this monograph is introducing new classes of NSIs that the most studied languages do not have, namely head-like NSIs. These elements provide a new perspective about the nature of NSIs, their licensing, and the nature and locus of negation. In Chapter 5, ‘PSIs with head-like properties’, Alqassas focuses on these elements and shows that the head status of these elements comes from their ability to host clitics and their ability to assign case to these clitics. One question of interest is the syntactic status of these elements: are they heads of a clausal projection? Alqassas shows that Benmamoun’s (Reference Benmamoun2006) head-complement analysis, where the NSI is a clausal head selecting a NegP as a complement runs into various problems. One problem is that it predicts ungrammatical structures where a negative projection follows the NPI to be grammatical (e.g. *ʕumr-o kaan maa yħib-ha ‘He never loved her’; 179, (19b)). Moreover, one cannot claim that these elements are heads selecting a NegP as a complement because this does not capture many cases where an overt NM is absent and still a preverbal head-like NSI is ungrammatical (e.g. *ʕumr-o maħadaaš zaar el-batra ‘No one has ever visited Petra’; 180, (21a)). Alternatively, Alqassas argues that these elements are AdvPs in a specifier position of some clausal projection, which can be NegP, rather than being heads projecting a clausal projection. The behavior of these elements in preverbal position is the focus of the discussion in the chapter, since it is not clear how negation can license these elements, especially in cases where it appears that a focused element (or a verbal element like kaan; see e.g. Al Khalaf Reference Al Khalaf2019) intervenes between the NSI and negation. In all cases, these elements must be followed by a nominal or a pronominal element which does not have to be the subject of the sentence (it could be a focused object). This indicates that these NSIs can fall within the CP domain, indicating that a mere spec-head agreement is not always how these elements are licensed. Alqassas shows that there is variation in how these elements are licensed depending on their locus relative to negation, the type of negation, and whether or not they precede a focus fronted element. In all cases, licensing may occur either overtly (spec-head agreement or c-command) or covertly (via reconstruction at LF).

The morphology, syntax, and semantics of cliticization is one of the main topics in the linguistic literature (e.g. Spencer Reference Spencer2012). Arabic is a rich source of data in this respect since cliticization is extensively employed in this language. Chapter 5, ‘PSIs with head-like properties’, contributes to this topic since it presents an analysis of how the case of the pronominal clitics hosted by head-like NSIs is assigned. How can NSIs assign accusative case to the clitics although they do not have a thematic relation to these dependents? Alqassas argues that it is Neg that assigns acc case to the complement of a NSI just like T is able to assign nom case to its specifier. This proposal has important consequences on not only the nature of clitics and their case feature, but also the nature of Neg as a functional head.

All in all, the book makes a great contribution to the literature on NSIs at the empirical and the theoretical levels by presenting new and interesting data from various dialects of Arabic. The typologies of NIs and NMs proposed by Alqassas make a rich source and an important basis for future research on the topic.