Assignment 10: Negation

For each positive assertion in English, there appears to be a corresponding
negative assertion:

(1)   My beer is warm.
(2)   My beer is not warm.

(3)   Harvey has wrestled alligators.
(4)   Harvey has not wrestled alligators.

You can test this out.  Think of any positive assertion, and see if you can
produce the corresponding negative.

This homework will be about the negative versions of sentences.  Beware,
because there are negative versions of other things.  In

(5)   Not many cats will eat dog food.
and
(6)   We found her not in the kitchen, but in the basement.

we see the negation of NPs and PPs.  In

(7)   She might have been not paying attention.

we see the negation of a VP.  These cases, where the thing negated is not
the whole S, are called "constituent negation".  We will not be concerned
with constituent negation in this assignment, but only with sentence negation.

A.  In determining the syntax of sentence negation, the first task is to
decide where 'not' goes in the sentence structure.

The first task is to make up a lot of sentences with 'not', carefully
eliminating any that are not sentence negation.  Then see if you can state
a simple generalization about where the 'not' of sentence negation appears.

B.  The second task is to revise our grammar so that sentences with 'not'
will be correctly generated.  This may be tricky.

Let's adopt the hypothesis that Modals are Ts,
and that T is the head of a TP (equivalent to our old S):

	TP -> {NP} T VP		(perhaps T VP is a phrase too?)
	      {CP}
	VP -> V VP

	VP -> V (NP) (AP) (PP)* (CP)

Considering at this point *only* sentences with Modals and 'not', propose
a change to the grammar that will generate such sentences:

(8)	The pig will not run away.
(9)	An outbreak of measles should not ruin your vacation.

Now make sure that your revised grammar also correctly generates sentences
with Modals, 'not', and other Auxiliaries:

(10)   The frog must not have eaten the grasshopper.


C.  Now here's the next problem:  Does this account for the orders of all
the verbal elements in negative sentences?  Consider facts like:

(11)	The frog had not eaten the grasshopper.
(12)	The frog was not eating the grasshopper.
(13)	*The frog ate not the grasshopper.
(14)	The frog did not eat the grasshopper.
(15)	The frog had not been eating the grasshopper.
(16)	*The frog not had been eating the grasshopper.
(17)	*The frog had been eating not the grasshopper.

The question, of course, is how to modify the grammar so that the
grammatical sentences are generated and the ungrammatical ones are not.
This may be very hard.  Try as hard as you can.

In any case, try to say in plain English exactly where 'not' will be found
in the negation of a sentence.  That should not be so hard.