Two challenges for existentialist approaches to strict negative concord

Abstract

I present two challenges for the popular approach to the meaning of negative concord items, or neg-words, as existential quantifiers or indefinites. The first challenge concerns the interaction of that analysis with the approaches to fragment answers as instances of clausal ellipsis. The second challenge stems from the ability of multiple neg-words within one clause to be modified by almost, which is unexpected if they are existentials or indefinites.