Syntactic Analysis Of "Notional Be+Not" Structure

"Notional be+not" structure is a kind of common linguistic phenomenon in the English language, for example, "he is not a student" or "he is not happy". However, if we observe the present syntactic regulations i.e. if we consider "be" as the main verb and "not" as the head of the NEGP and Spec-VP as the initial location of the subject; this structure seems to violate the Head Movement Constraint (HMC) (which was put forth by Travis in 1984). Up to now, the mechanics of "notional be+not" structure seems not satisfactorily explained.The author of this paper tries to find a way out.After making a profound survey on the features of "notional be" and negator "not", including those features that may dodge attention; the author explores the possibility of the movement as well as the necessity of the movement. During the exploration, the author deduces that "not" in "notional be+not" structure is not the head of NEGP, but an adverb. This conclusion counters the prevalent consideration of "not" (when used to express sentential negation) as the head of NEGP. What's more, "not" and "n' t" are by no means different forms of the same concept. Phonetically, morphologically, syntactically, and stylistically they are two different concepts. And "the Lack of Do-support" feature of "notional be" provides both the possibility and necessity of the movement.The mechanics of the movement, including head movement and subject movement, is carefully described; and the evidence for themovement is also provided.Finally, the author concludes that adequate explanation of linguistic phenomena by means of syntactic theory can be attained only when features of linguistic phenomena are profoundly explored.