Russian -nibud’ indefinites are positive polarity items

Pavel Astafiev
HSE University / Pushkin State Russian Language Institute

Abstract: The fact that Russian ‑nibud’ indefinites are not typically licensed by clausemate negation poses a problem for their analysis. In this paper, I point out that this problem has a simple solution: ‑nibud’ indefinites are local positive polarity items. I show that ‑nibud’ indefinites can take scope below negation in the same cases where the narrow scope of such positive polarity items as the English some or the Russian simple disjunction ili is available. Moreover, in some of these cases, the grammaticality of ‑nibud’ can only be attributed to the presence of negation.

Keywords: marked indefinites, non-specificity, positive polarity, non-veridicality, anaphoric accessibility

For citation: Astafiev P. Russian -nibud’ indefinites are positive polarity items. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2025. Vol. 8, iss. 1. Pp. 13–31. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2025.19.42.001