Interclausal NEG raising and the scope of negation

Abstract

In this paper, we show that the syntactic analysis of one major type of NEG raising in Collins & Postal (2014) is inconsistent with the facts of negation scope revealed by Klima (1964) type tests for sentential negation. Two of the four original Klima tests plus three additional ones are discussed. We propose a novel alternative syntactic analysis, one also involving NEG raising, that is consistent with the relevant tests, as well as with all the principles of NEG raising and NEG deletion proposed in Collins & Postal (2014). We suggest, further, that the newer analysis permits a more uniform overall conception of the various cases of NEG Raising.

Disentangling two distinct notions of NEG raising

“…Since the analysis in CP ( 2014) is more or less equivalent to traditional syntactic analyses and is more widely known, for convenience's sake, we adopt it in this article. But our conclusions would also apply to any account involving syntactic NEG raising, such as that of Collins & Postal 2017a. Even more than that in CP (2014), the analysis in Collins & Postal 2017a appeals heavily to NEG deletion; see the cited works for details.…”

De Morgan’s laws and NEG-raising: a syntactic view

“…Relevant examples are like sentences (15) and 16 Collins and Postal [20,21] have reinvigorated the syntactic treatment of NEG-raising, providing novel arguments to distinguish between at least three cases: a) Standard cases of NEG-raising: cyclic predicate-to-predicate raising b) Negative quantifier cases: NEG raised to a predicate interacting with an embedded quantified NP c) Cloud of the unknown cases [22].…”

“…We will further restrict our inquiry to two variants of the coordinated structure matrix and embedded (as in examples (18a) and (18b), respectively): (14)). This is possible if, following previous authors [17,18,20,21], NEG-raising in the standard cases is formalised as a syntactic reordering rule (in the sense of Ross [14, p. 427]); in this case, NEG-raising must be subjected to the same requirements (filters, conditions, and constraints) as other rules of the grammar. This means, crucially, that NEG raising out of coordinated structures is subject to the CSC and, therefore, is only grammatical if it applies ATB.…”

“…Collins and Postal's ([20;21,) analysis requires what they refer to as an interpretation property of NEG:An NEG is interpreted only in its position of origin…”

Negation raising and mood. A corpus-based study of Polish sądzić ‘think’ and wierzyć ‘believe’

“…The notion was adopted in many other approaches, such as R. Lakoff (1969), Ross (1973), Prince (1976) or, more recently, Collins & Postal (2014, 2017; see also Kiparsky (1970), Jackendoff (1971), Pollack (1976), Klima (1964), Lasnik (1972), Zeijlstra (2018) as well as the semantic-pragmatic approaches, which essentially go back to Bartsch (1973), such as Horn (1978), Horn and Bayer (1984), Tovena (2001), Sailer (2006), Gajewski (2007), Romoli (2013), among others. See also Crowley (2019), who argues that both purely syntactic and semantic-pragmatic approaches are needed in order to account for the full range of data.…”