The syntax of negation

Liliane M. V. Haegeman

In this new 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...

See on goodreads | librarything