Does Neg-Raising Involve Neg-Raising?

Abstract

Neg-Raising concerns the phenomenon by which certain negated predicates (e.g. think, believe, expect) can give rise to a reading where the negation seems to take scope from an embedded clause. The standard analysis in pragma-semantic terms goes back to Bartsch (Linguistische Berichte 27:1–7, 1973) and has been elaborated in Horn (Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, 1978, 1989), Gajewski (Neg-raising: polarity and presupposition, PhD Dissertation, MIT, 2005; Linguistics Philosophy 30:298–328, 2007), Romoli (Linguistics Philosophy 36:291–353, 2013), and many others. Recently, this standard approach has been challenged by Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), who argue, by providing various novel arguments, that Neg-Raising involves syntactic movement of the negation from the embedded clause into the matrix clause. The syntactic structure of ‘I don’t think you’re right’ would then be like: I do[n’t]_i think you’re t_i right, and the Neg-Raising reading would result from the interpretation of the lower copy of the negation. In this paper I present three novel arguments against this account. First, following up work by Horn (Black Book: a festschrift in honor of Frans Zwarts, University of Groningen, Groningen, 2014), I show that Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), and their reply to Horn (Collins and Postal, ‘Dispelling the Cloud of Unknowing.’ Ms., NYU. LingBuzz/002269, 2015), predict that every negated predicate that can license so-called Horn-clauses (non-negative clauses containing NPIs in a position where subject–auxiliary inversion is licensed) should receive a Neg-Raising reading, contrary to fact. Second, Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) adopt various instances of phonological deletion of negative operators—a necessary ingredient for their account—but these instances of phonological deletion cannot be independently motivated. Third, it turns out that for certain constructions, Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) must also allude to the original Bartschian approach. I further demonstrate that the standard, pragma-semantic approach to Neg-Raising actually explains the grammaticality of Horn-clauses and other phenomena, such as the distribution of negative parentheticals, that were presented by Collins and Postal (Classical NEG Raising, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014) as arguments in favour of the syntactic approach to Neg-Raising, equally well, if not better, than this syntactic alternative.