Analyses of Negation in English
H. Lasnik, 1972
This thesis is an attempt to give a unified account of the syntax and semantics of negation, and in particular, of the lexical item not. Two analyses are presented and discussed: the first providing for the deep structure occurrence of not in the specifier of adverbials and noun phrases and deep structure interpretation of the scope of negation, and the second providing for generation of not in sentence initial position and derived structure scope interpretation. It is argued that the second analysis provides a better description of two adverbial classes that are superficially parallel but differ in significant syntactic and semantic respects. Further, it is suggested that a comprehensive theory of scope semantics would require derived structure scope interpretive rules. The semantics of the quantifier any are considered and Quine"s proposal that any is the universal quantifier is supported, and evidence is presented that its distribution can be predicted if it is regarded as the marked form of the universal quantifier. Finally, the analysis of Lakoff and Carden and that of Jackendoff are considered. The former is shown to be untenable, and the latter is shown to be unable to account for some of the phenomena discussed.
Thesis Supervisor: Noam Chomsky
Title: Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics
Chapter 0 Introduction 6
Chapter I The Syntax of Not 9
1 Determiner theory 17
2 Pre-S theory 24
Chapter II Some Aspects of the Semantics of Negation 43
1 Scope and the determiner theory 55
2 Scope and the pre-S theory 66
3 Syntactic and semantic rules and their ordering in the pre-S theory 82
4 Scope, reference, and specificity 90
5 A speculation on the meaning and function of any 94
6 Concluding observations 101
Chapter III Previous Analyses 104
1 Lakoff and Carden 105
2 Commentary on the derivational constraints analysis 111
2.1 The stronger derivational constraint 120
2.2 Scope and island constraints 128
2.2a Co-ordinate structures and missing ambiguities 131
2.2b Possessivized NP"s 138
2.2c Other types of islands 140
2.3 The derivational constraint on lowering rules 143
2.4 Relative clauses and a surfeit of ambiguities 144
3 Jackendoff 151