Negative conjuncts and negative concord across the board

Negative concord is a prominent one-to-many correspondence between form and meaning at the syntax-semantics interface, in which one semantic function may correlate with several semantic exponents. Languages are typically classified as showing negative concord or not, yet they all seem to exhibit the same interpretation strategy of conjoined negative noun phrases, i.e. cases like no lecture and no seminar. We will analyze this construction within a framework of a constraint-based, underspecified syntax-semantics interface (Lexical Resource Semantics, LRS,
Richter & Sailer 2004). We will combine an earlier LRS analysis of cross-linguistic variation of negative concord with a new analysis of coordination. The latter will make it necessary to integrate into LRS so-called equality up-to constraints, which were originally introduced in Pinkal (1999) as a core type of constraint for underspecified semantic systems. We show that the resulting analysis captures the negative-concord-like behavior of conjoined negative noun phrases even in a non-negative concord language like Standard German.