Syntactic negation in Ewe (Tongugbe) agent nominalizations

Drawing on evidence from the scope patterns and the availability of negative polarity item (NPI) licensing of the negation marker ma-, we show that NegP is realized in Ewe (Tongugbe) agentive nominals. We conclude that agentive nominals accommodate sentential negation, posing a challenge to previous assumptions. The implication of this work is that agent nominalizations can be more verb-like than what has been reported in the literature. We further examine where the Ewe agentive suffix -la resides in syntax based on the argument structure of the predicates realized inside agentive nominals.