Not in the first place
Hedde Zeijlstra
October 2010 

In this paper I discuss two problems concerning the syntax and semantic of sentence-initial negation: the ban on True Negative Imeratives that is attested in many languages and the ban on sole negative markers in sentence-initial position in V-to-C languages. In this paper I have argued that both problems can be explained in a unified way as a result of the interplay between the syntactic and semantic status of negative markers, the fact that operators encoding the illocutionary force of a speech act take scope from C° and general effects that govern movement. The ban on TNI’s follows from the fact that no semantically negative marker may dominate the illocutionary feature in C° and it is correctly predicted that all languages where such a semantically negative marker is a syntactic head ban TNI’s. The ban on sole negative markers in sentence-initial position in V-to-C languages also results from the fact that no negative material is allowed to dominate the illocutionary features in C° and that therefore negative material may only appear in Spec,CP provided that it can be reconstructed at LF.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000523 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000523)
Published in:	Amsterdam
keywords:	negation, imperatives, v2, v-to-c, negative concord, negative markers, prohibitives, fronting, topicalisation, reconstruction, syntax, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [December 2007] v1 [October 2007]
Downloaded:	352 times

 

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