Not-Floating in the not…but Construction: A constraint-Based Approach

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate a floating phenomenon of the not...but construction by means of a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). In terms of the floating of the negative element not, the previous researches on the not...but construction investigated only balanced coordination cases. However, this paper proposes that not in the not...but construction can float over a sentence either direction – too high or too low – and should be restricted not to float within the scope of the contrastive focus. This floating pattern of not is identical with other coordinate markers in the correlative coordination – either, neither and both – resulting in unbalanced coordination. In analyzing the not-floating phenomena, the word order domain approach is adopted, which postulates the independent level for ordering of words. The previous movement approach or the ellipsis approach could not provide a successful analysis on the floating phenomena, while keeping the Symmetric Condition. However, I propose corrective but modification construction and linear Precedence Rules on the ground of the word order domain approach, from which the not floating phenomena can be fully analyzed.