On negation

Abstract

In this paper I present a description of the scoping properties of negation based on the topic-focus articulation of the sentence, within the framework of the Prague Functional Generative Description. In the primary case, negation has in its scope the focus, or the new information, of the sentence. The secondary cases are connected with the topicalization of negation and/or of the material in its scope. The material in the scope of negation may be syntactically structured in very diverse ways and it need not correspond to a constituent, which is an argument for the adequacy of the choice of the dependency model. The scoping properties of negation exhibit striking similarities to those of focusing particles and sentence adverbials, and therefore I propose to treat these expressions jointly. © 1990.