Expression of the syntax of not

This article is an attempt to give a unified account of the syntax and semantics of negation, and in particular, of the lexical item not. Two analyses are presented and discussed: the first providing for the deep structure occurrence of not in the specifier of adverbials and noun phrases and deep structure interpretation of the scope of negation, and the second providing for generation of not in sentence initial position and derived structure scope interpretation. It is argued that the second analysis provides a better description of two adverbial classes that are superficially parallel but differ in significant syntactic and semantic respects. Further, it is suggested that a comprehensive theory of scope semantics would require derived structure scope interpretive rules. The semantics of the quantifier any are considered and Quine’s proposal that any is the "universal quantifier is supported, and evidence is presented that its distribution can be predicted if it is regarded as the marked form of the universal quantifier.