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Description:
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In this book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation
within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima
and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative
sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in
terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the
AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH-criterion in interrogative
sentences and as the NEG-criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that
in the same way that in many languages the WH-criterion gives rise to
WH-movement, the NEG-criterion may also give rise to NEG-movement. This is
particularly clear in the Germanic languages. In the analysis of sentential
negation in Romance languages the author makes extensive use of the notion
of representational chain, showing that in these languages too the
NEG-criterion applies at the level of S-structure. In addition to providing
a syntactic analysis of sentential negation the book also raises a number
of theoretical issues such as that of the distinction between A-positions
and A'-positions and the level of application of well-formedness
conditions. This book will be of interest to all those working on
theoretical syntax, particularly of the Germanic and Romance languages.
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