When VP-Ellipsis and Sluicing Conspire against Syntactic NEG Raising

Abstract

In this squib, I will analyze a hitherto unnoticed interaction between VP-ellipsis and sluicing (TP-ellipsis) in English in which the VP-ellipsis site contains a certain positive propositional complement headed by a neg-raising predicate whereas the TP-ellipsis site instead denotes the negative counterpart of the exact same proposition, thereby yielding a mismatched-polarity interpretation between the two-ellipsis sites. I will show that the relevant data presented here provide strong support for a pragma-semantic approach to the so-called neg-raised reading (Bartsch 1973; Gajewski 2005, 2007; Kroll 2019) over the syntactic NEG raising alternative (Collins and Postal 2014, 2018).