Groupes nominaux négatifs issus de la réduction de verbes supports

Abstract

On the basis of general syntactic operations, within Z. S. Harris framework, we establish, for Portuguese, a syntactic relation between negative NPs, headed by a predicative noun (e.g. A não ratificação desse tratado por parte de alguns países; The non-ratification of that treaty by some countries), and negative support verb sentences (Não houve ratificação desse tratado por parte de alguns países; There was no ratification of that treaty by some countries). Support verb sentences, in turn, correspond to the nominalization of negative verbal (and adjectival) sentences (Alguns países não ratificaram esse tratado; Some countries did not ratify that treaty). Such an approach also clarifies the linguistic status of the element não (non) occurring in negative noun phrases, with predicative nouns, a linguistic fact mentioned sporadically by grammarians, and treated by lexicographers in a totally inconsistent way.Theoretical data were verified experimentally for Portuguese, English and French, on real text corpora, and the results confirm the consistency of the analysis.