The Syntax of Negation

Abstract

In this book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH-criterion in interrogative sentences and as the NEG-criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that in the same way that in many languages the WH-criterion gives rise to WH-movement, the NEG-criterion may also give rise to NEG-movement. This is particularly clear in the Germanic languages. In the analysis of sentential negation in Romance languages the author makes extensive use of the notion of representational chain, showing that in these languages too the NEG-criterion applies at the level of S-structure. In addition to providing a syntactic analysis of sentential negation the book also raises a number of theoretical issues such as that of the distinction between A-positions and A'-positions and the level of application of well-formedness conditions. This book will be of interest to all those working on theoretical syntax, particularly of the Germanic and Romance languages.