I X terpet’ ne mogu: Finnish NPI verbs and some Russian counterparts

Abstract

Negopetal verbs have received much less attention in scholarly discussion, compared to other types of NPI (negative polarity item). In Finnish, there is quite a large open class of verbs that tend to cluster in NPI. In a contrastive study I demonstrate some types of Finnish negopetal constructions and their translation equivalents in a parallel corpus of Finnish and Russian. The results allow for identifying some frequent patterns in Russian used in contexts where Finnish prefers NPI verbs; however, they provide evidence for only few straightforward equivalents among the Finnish and Russian verbs.