I Like This Analysis, but I Don’t Think Every Linguist Will: Syntactic NOT-Transportation, VP Ellipsis and VP Pronominalisation

Abstract

In this article I consider some recent objections raised against the syntactic treatment of negation in English multiclausal structures, in particular what has been called NEG-raising. I argue that the objections based on pronominalisation and ellipsis presented in the recent literature do pose a problem for syntactic accounts of the mechanisms of so-called NOT-transportation that rely on a rule of leftwards movement, as is customary in generative grammar. However, there is an alternative syntactic treatment that assumes that negation originates as a higher predicate and is subject to a rule of lowering. I show that a syntactic theory of NOT-transportation is tenable and accounts for the problematic data if NEG-raising is replaced, in the analysis of the cases considered here, by a rule of NEG-lowering.