When shields and distances are key: a corpus-based study of Slovene bare pronouns in negated clauses

In some strict Negative Concord (NC) languages, Negative Concord Items (NCIs) can be freely used in negated clauses, while pronominal Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) are blocked. Despite being a strict NC language, Slovene does not exhibit such blocking. This raises the question of why there is more than one pronoun group suitable for use in negated clauses. We seek to provide an answer to this question by offering a comprehensive analysis of the data from the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0. We focus on the scopal interaction between Slovene bare PSI pronouns and different types of clausemate negation, showing that bare pronouns either outscope propositional negation or appear in its scope with the help of "shielding" positive implicatures. Unmodified bare pronouns commonly occur in the scope of presuppositional negation, which is syntactically more distant from them than propositional negation and highlights the contextual activation of the embedded proposition. The pragmatic markedness exhibited by bare pronouns in the scope of negation is expected, as such use is much less prominent in the paradigm of negated clauses.