Freestanding n-words in Russian: A Syntactic Account

This article provides a syntactic account of freestanding n-words in Russian. The analysis is based on the theory in Brown 1999, where Russian n-words are licensed by agreement with the sentential negation head. Under the proposed analysis, freestanding n-words are licensed by agreement with a phonologically null negative head. The article works out the details of this agreement process for both n-words licensed by sentential negation and freestanding n-words licensed by a phonologically null negative head. As a result, it provides an argument that the driving force of movement must lie in the moving element, the n-word.