Premium
ON NEGATION–A POSSIBLE ANALYSIS
Author(s) -
Källgren Gunnel
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1976.tb00638.x
Subject(s) - topicalization , negation , linguistics , syntax , computer science , sentence , grammar , verb , inversion (geology) , phrase , subject (documents) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , paleontology , structural basin , library science , biology
Summary This paper treats of the syntax of negation in English. It is formulated within a variant of case grammar called “bicomponential syntax”. This model is no necessary prerequisite for the rules of negation, which could probably be reformulated in accordance with other models. Still, I hope to be able to show that it has advantages of its own. The principles of this syntactic model were first suggested in a work on verb phrase topicalization in Swedish (Källgren 1972) and further explorations showed it to be easily applicable to related problems in other languages. In this paper I will present some basic facts about topicalization and introduce the important idea of an underlying verb. In connection with a sample derivation the characteristics of bicomponential grammar are shown and motivated. A concept called “in dominant construction with” is suggested and compared to “in construction with” and “command”. The consequences of double modification, i. e. allowing negation and questioning to work on both sentence and constituent level, are investigated. The effect of all this apparatus on negation and connected problems, e. g. subject‐aux inversion, do ‐support, the so‐called “affective contexts” and the choice between some and any , is shown. The latter part of the article contains a survey of earlier works in the same area, discussing the contributions of Klima, Langacker, Ross, and Jackendoff. The advantages of the approach presented here are demonstrated. Finally, the possible drawbacks are treated with regard to suprasegmental, textual and contextual influences. A formalization of the more important rules is given in an Appendix.