NegOP Hypothesis: A Syntactical Inquiry Into Sentential Negation

The sentential negation, as well as known, is an important and indispensablesentence pattern in human beings’ communication. It has been discussed by manyscholars in their works since the time of Plato. A great number of linguists have writtenmany accounts on sentential negation. In general, the linguistic study is mainly from theperspectives of semantics, pragmatics and syntax.The controversies on the studies of sentential negation in syntax start with thejudgment of the identity of negative markers, i.e. whether the negative markers areadverbs, clitics or inflections. Different categorical definitions of the negative markersdirectly determine the different syntactic positions. All in all, there are at least threesyntactic analyses which have analyzed them as head of IP, NegP and∑P respectively.These analyses do contribute to explore the identity of negative markers as well as thesyntactic structure of sentential negation. However, they are mainly based on thesyntactical description of the linear order of a sentence, neglecting the syntactic positionof negative markers in logic. Therefore, the previous studies can not escape from theinterferences of phenomena and confusion of diachrony with synchrony. They areinevitable to constrain themselves to describe the syntactic structure of one language.With the minimalist spirit and the data collected from English and Romanlanguages, this study is managed to solve the problems in the previous studies, andintends to propose a new account of the syntactic structure of sentential negation bylogical derivation. Since the negative marker, such as English not, Italian non, French neand pas, Spanish no etc, has a special syntactic property, the thesis starts the research byredefining the identity of the negative marker, arguing the impossibility of the negativemarker as adverb, clitic and inflection, the necessity of analyzing the maximalprojection headed by the negative markers, the ways how it influences the sententialnegation and its relation with other functional categories in a sentence.This study asserts the negative marker, presenting the property of adjunct, as an operator1, belongs to the functional category. It is an important negative operator of thebasic frame of language, i.e. F [S [NP VP]] rather than a necessary element for VP in asentence. Therefore, its logic scope is not only over VP, but over the frame. Furthermore,a conclusion drawn from the analysis is that the negative markers do not instantiate anyfeatures of INFL. As an independent category, the negative marker has its own maximalprojection which will be analyzed as NegOP (negative operator phrase). It is just outsidethe frame and adjusts it by optionally choosing the constituents to assign negativefeatures. This new analysis can not only explain the generative position of negativemarkers in the syntactic structure, but also opens up the possibility to solve the problemof the relation between the negative marker and T (tense), Agr (agreement). Moreimportantly, the new proposals of the negative markers and the syntactic structuring ofsentential negation can be dedicated to the improvement of the grammaticalunderstanding as well as the grammatical teaching and learning.