In this book I develop an analysis of the syntax of negation against the background of the generative tradition, more specifically the Principles and Parameters framework initiated by Noam Chomsky.

The linguistics literature is full of discussions of negation and has been so for a long time. Discussions have ranged from the morphological aspects of negation, to the syntax, the semantics and the pragmatics. In this book I do not intend to provide an exhaustive discussion of all the aspects of negation which were, at one moment or another, prominent issues in the linguistics literature. This could not be the topic of one book, but it would be the topic of a series. I concentrate on the syntactic aspects of negation, focusing almost exclusively on what is usually referred to as sentence negation, i.e. those examples where the negation marker has scope over and thus gives negative value to a whole sentence, as is the case in the following English sentences: (i) I won't go there any more and (ii) No one said nothing or (iii) He gave nothing to Mary.

I will not restrict the discussion to an analysis of aspects of the syntax of negation; rather I will try to bring out those aspects of the syntax of negation which are not specific to negative sentences as such, but which belong to the larger domain of the syntax of operators, with special attention to the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences.