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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1287-1299
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 04 Oct 2022 Revised 18 Nov 2022 Accepted 30 Nov 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202211.1287

T-to-C movement and (Un)Ambiguity of Uncontracted Negative Interrogatives

Kwang-sup Kim
Professor, Department of English Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Tel: 031) 330-4294 kwangsup@hufs.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

There are two types of negative interrogatives: contracted negative interrogatives and uncontracted negative interrogatives. There is a consensus that the former type permits a sentential negation reading only. However, there is speaker variation about the latter type. Some speakers permit both a sentential negation reading and a constituent negation reading, whereas some others reject the possibility that it can give a sentential negation reading. Sentential negation and constituent negation are usually in complementary distribution: that is, it is hard to find a construction in which the negative word not can be used as either sentential negation or constituent negation. However, this paper claims that (i) T-movement can give rise to structural ambiguity between a sentential negation reading and a constituent negation reading, (ii) the uncontracted negative interrogative is a case in point, and (iii) the speaker variation about the uncontracted negative interrogative follows from a Gricean Maxim—the Maxim of Manner.

Keywords:

T-to-C movement, contracted negative interrogatives, uncontracted negative interrogatives, sentential negation, constituent negation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research fund (2022) of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. I am thankful to two anonymous reviewers of Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics for their helpful comments and suggests. Usual disclaimers apply.

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