Abstract In many languages, elements that can independently induce a semantic negation jointly yield only one semantic negation, a phenomenon known as Negative Concord (NC). Italian Non ha telefonato nessuno (Not has called nobody), for example, means ‘Nobody called’. The existence of NC leads to (at least) two questions: why is it that the two negative elements do not yield a reading with two semantic negations being present (as would be expected, given compositionality); and what constrains the range of variation that can cross-linguistically be attested with respect to NC? This chapter focuses on the first question, and argues that NC items are semantically non-negative, but carry a syntactic feature that has to agree with a possibly covert negative operator. The chapter also discusses the empirical and theoretical consequences of this proposal, and identifies some follow-up questions which arise out of the proposal and which will be addressed in detail in the subsequent chapters.
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