Vulgar Minimisers in English and Spanish

In this paper, we investigated whether vulgar minimisers form a natural class in English and Spanish by evaluating (i) their similarities and differences with respect to non-vulgar minimisers and (ii) whether vulgar minimisers are inherently negative in these languages. We proposed that vulgar minimisers in the two languages are lexically ambiguous between polarity-sensitive items and quasi-negative expressions containing a local negation as part of their structure. As polarity-sensitive items, vulgar minimisers show similarities with non-vulgar minimisers when it comes to compulsory co-occurrence with the sentential negative marker, compulsory co-occurrence with not/ni ‘not even’ in fragment answers and when preposed, and triggering of subject-auxiliary inversion when preposed. By contrast, as quasi-negative expressions containing a local negation as part of their structure vulgar minimisers are allowed to optionally co-occur with the sentential negative marker and not be preceded by not/ni ‘not even’ when occurring as fragment answers or when preposed. We also argued that the internal negation in (quasi-)negative vulgar minimisers can only take narrow scope, thus resulting in sentences with vulgar minimisers being diagnosed as non-negative by sentential negation tests.