Abstract
Neg-Raising concerns the phenomenon by which certain negated predicates (e.g. think, believe, expect) can give rise to a reading where the negation seems to take scope from an embedded clause. The standard analysis in pragma-semantic terms goes back to Bartsch (Linguistische Berichte 27:1–7, 1973) and has been elaborated in Horn (Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, 1978, 1989), Gajewski (Neg-raising: polarity and presupposition, PhD Dissertation, MIT, 2005; Linguistics Philosophy 30:298–328, 2007), Romoli (Linguistics Philosophy 36:291–353, 2013), and many others. Recently, this standard approach has been challenged by Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), who argue, by providing various novel arguments, that Neg-Raising involves syntactic movement of the negation from the embedded clause into the matrix clause. The syntactic structure of ‘I don’t think you’re right’ would then be like: I do[n’t]i think you’re ti right, and the Neg-Raising reading would result from the interpretation of the lower copy of the negation. In this paper I present three novel arguments against this account. First, following up work by Horn (Black Book: a festschrift in honor of Frans Zwarts, University of Groningen, Groningen, 2014), I show that Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), and their reply to Horn (Collins and Postal, ‘Dispelling the Cloud of Unknowing.’ Ms., NYU. LingBuzz/002269, 2015), predict that every negated predicate that can license so-called Horn-clauses (non-negative clauses containing NPIs in a position where subject–auxiliary inversion is licensed) should receive a Neg-Raising reading, contrary to fact. Second, Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) adopt various instances of phonological deletion of negative operators—a necessary ingredient for their account—but these instances of phonological deletion cannot be independently motivated. Third, it turns out that for certain constructions, Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) must also allude to the original Bartschian approach. I further demonstrate that the standard, pragma-semantic approach to Neg-Raising actually explains the grammaticality of Horn-clauses and other phenomena, such as the distribution of negative parentheticals, that were presented by Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) as arguments in favour of the syntactic approach to Neg-Raising, equally well, if not better, than this syntactic alternative.
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Notes
Gajweski (2007) takes these excluded middle presuppositions to be soft presuppositions (in the sense of Abusch 2002, 2010), as they behave differently from so-called hard presuppositions. For instance, these excluded middle presuppositions can easily be suspended, e.g. in the case of (1a), in contexts where the speaker has made clear to have no thoughts about the issue, whereas hard presuppositions cannot be that easily suspended. For this and other reasons, Romoli (2013) takes the excluded middle inference to be a scalar alternative and takes Neg-Raising readings to result from scalar implicatures.
Note that this objection would disappear if negative indefinites were taken to be universal quantifiers that outscope negation (as has been argued for Greek neg-words by Giannakidou (2000) and for Japanese neg-words by Shimoyama 2001, 2006). For non-Negative Concord languages, like English, there is strong evidence that negative indefinites are indeed existentials/indefinites under the scope of negation (cf. Penka 2011, Zeijlstra 2011, Iatridou and Sichel 2013 for an overview and discussion), though, and in the current debate nobody has pursued an alternative analysis in terms of universal quantifiers.
CP14 employ various Neg-Deletion rules (cf. CP14: ch. 8 for an overview). The Neg-Deletion rule applying here states that an NPI-licenser can license the deletion of a clausemate negation, provided that the total number of deleted negations is even and provided they stand in a c-command chain. CP14 do not postulate this rule just for these Neg-Raising constructions, but they also apply it to account for weak NPI-hood in general. For CP14, a sentence like also contains two covert negations, and has the underlying structure (i) At most three students ate any apples. (ii) At most three students ate NEG NEG some apples.
One could argue that this would predict that Wh-terms cannot be extracted from the complements of non-Neg-Raising predicates, contrary to fact. When does Mona say/claim that Jim should call Irene? is perfectly grammatical. However, there is a rich body of (uncontroversial) evidence in syntactic theory that in these cases the Wh-term does not move directly from its base position to its final position, but first lands in an intermediate position, which is at the edge of its original syntactic domain, but already visible for the next syntactic domain (cf. Chomsky 1973, 2001).
For more discussion on strict NPIs, Neg-Raising and island effects, see also Romoli (2013).
A third case study concerns too + infinitive cases (e.g. Bill is too lazy to work), which I do not discuss in detail in this paper for reasons of space. I refer to Romoli (2013) for a discussion that aims at discarding too + infinitive constituting evidence for phonologically deleted negations.
Again, similar diagnostics apply to squat: I know squat about negation, and Mary knows squat about negation, too. vs. I don’t know squat about negation, and Mary doesn’t knows squat about negation, either. Thanks to Larry Horn for pointing this out to me.
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Zeijlstra, H. Does Neg-Raising Involve Neg-Raising?. Topoi 37, 417–433 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9461-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9461-0