This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It…

A discussion of passives in the context of generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) looks at two problems associated with a lexical rule that derives passive participles from active verbs. The first occurs with sentences whose main verb takes an NP and does not have a passive counterpart. This situation requires a more restrictive metarule, and…

A study of problems posed by Mandarin Chinese data for modern linguistic theory focuses on the reduplication involved in the "A-not-A" construction. The Mandarin data and its possible descriptions are used to investigate the question of whether context-free languages are adequate to describe certain linguistic data. These data constitute a case…