More misery is coming: Negative Concord not as a form of AGREE in West Slavic

This paper explores the phenomenon of Negative Concord (NC) in West Slavic (WS) languages and challenges the comparison to the traditional Minimalist AGREE. Through empirical analysis, it demonstrates that NC operates beyond typical locality constraints such as the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) and Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) and instead conforms to the finite CP boundary. This constraint applies uniformly to both licensing and movement, implying that no NC items can cross finite CP boundaries. By adopting a downward AGREE framework, this study provides a clearer understanding of NC, highlighting its distinct syntactic behaviour and reinforcing the significance of the CP boundary in WS languages.