| This dissertation considers the treatment of negation in Korean, English, French and Italian, within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). It focuses on three questions: (a) what are the main ways of expressing sentential negation in these languages? (b) what are the distributional properties of lexically encoded negative elements? (c) what do the answers to these two questions imply for the theory of grammar?;A fundamental distinction is drawn between four main ways of expressing negation in these languages: morphological negation, negative auxiliary verbs, adverbial negatives, and (clitic-like) negative verbs. It is argued that English and French allow their adverbial negative markers not and pas to be converted into complements in lexically restricted environments. Various independent arguments involving VP ellipsis and scope in English and VP preposing and clefting in French, support the analysis of not and pas as complements. This research also challenges the derivational view, in which the positioning of all negatives is determined by the interaction of movement operations, a large set of functional projections (including NegP), and their hierarchically fixed organization. It develops a nonderivational, lexicalist alternative in which the distributional possibilities of negative elements are explained in terms of their lexical properties and the interaction of the elementary morphosyntactic and valence properties of syntactic heads. The resulting lexicalist theory allows a more conservative division of labor between morphology and syntax that is argued to be far more economical and explanatory than a derivational analysis.;The theoretical foundations of HPSG lie in a concrete conception of constituent structure, a small inventory of universal principles, and enriched lexical representations. The analyses suggested herein exploit each of these foundations in an effort to replace analyses based on head movement and functional categories with alternatives that achieve broader coverage and superior explanation. |
