NEG lowering into quantifiers

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the derivation of English sentences in which negation (NEG) surfaces in a matrix clause but is interpreted as if it were in an embedded clause. The cases we are interested in allow NEG to be interpreted as having scope over a quantified subject NP in the embedded clause or over the verbal predicate in the same embedded clause. Syntactic approaches to this phenomenon have proposed a rule of NEG-raising which proceeds upwards in multi-clause structures, very much like a garden-variety movement transformation. Pragma-semantic approaches, in contrast, appeal in general to either a combination of the excluded middle law and a pre-suppositional analysis or scalar implicatures. Here we will argue that while the syntactic treatment of NEG seems to be generally correct, a leftwards/upwards approach to NEG movement does not yield the appropriate semantic representations for the sentences under consideration; rather, we propose a syntactic rule of NEG-lowering to account for the data we examine.