5. EN Triggers and Their Properties ("Expletive Negation" in Russian: A Conspiracy Theory *‪)‬

The logic developed in the previous section demanded the assumption that negation in yes/no questions with li cannot reconstruct. This gives the complementizer a special role, since it must be the interrogative complementizer that prevents reconstruction. The intuition that complementizers play an important role in EN phenomena is shared by many who have worked on EN (see Espinal 1992; Brown 1999a, b; Brown and Franks 1995, 1997). The special role of complementizers for EN is easily demonstrated. Compare examples (69=7b) and (70) (based again on data noticed by Brown and Franks 1995), which form a minimal pair. The difference lies in the choice of complementizer: kak by vs. cto. In (69), with kak by, negation has the characteristics of EN: it is unable to license the ni-phrase. With the complementizer cto, negation is true negation: ni-phrase licensing becomes possible.