Negative Subjunctive Clauses in Hausa: A Minimalist Analysis

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary investigation of an important phenomenon in Hausa, hereafter, referred to as Negative Subjunctive Clauses (henceforth NSC). These negative expressions exhibit a unique negative morphology and syntactically function as subjects in canonical declarative constructions. They basically, select propositional structures as their complements and have a subjunctive flavour. Some of the NSCs examined here are counterpart to Yelwa’s(1995) Positive Complement- Taking Expressions. But they significantly differ from the latter in that they prototypically display negative properties in their frozen constitution, somewhat behaving like fixed expressions in virtue of their opacity to syntactic permutation. We argue that these NSCs yield local negation effect and that they are underlyingly subject complements extraposed to the clausal position which generates obligatory movement.