Negative Degree Inversion and Related Matters

The purpose of this paper is to examine negative degree inversion (NDI) in English, investigate how it may be licensed, capture similarities and dissimilarities of NDI and other functional phrases, and find out the relationship between NDI and other inversions. Borroff (2006) calls the following (1b) negative degree inversion, which occurs in certain dialects in the context of negation. (1) a. John is not [a very good student]. b. John is not [very good a student]. The normal ordering (1a) and its inverted form (1b) are all acceptable. In other words, the inversion in (1b) is optional. In this respect, NDI reminds us of SVI, since in the latter, the inversion is optional. NDI is optional and requires the presence of a negative element, as shown by the following (2). (2) a. John is not [a very good student]. b. John is not [very good a student]. c. *John is [very good a student]. Borroff (2006) deals with characteristics of NDI, but she does not explain the relationship between NDI and other inversion phenomena in English. This is why I wish to try to explain the characteristics of NDI, in relation to the very nature of inversion constructions (ICs) in general. NDI is related to other ICs such as subject-verb inversion (SVI) and subject- auxiliary inversion (SAI). In English, degree-modified adjectives typically follow the determiner. On the contrary, they may precede the article in NDI constructions. This noncanonical word order seems to be related to a specific function, and this same function seems to have a close relation to some ICs. In this respect, I will investigate Green (1980) and explore the possibility that we may capture some generality between these ICs. I claim that the noncanonical word order of NDI is related to a particular function, that is, Green's (1980) emphatic function. In addition, I also claim that NDI shares this same function with SVI and SAI constructions. At first glance, NDI, SVI and SAI appear to be separate phenomena. However, if we take a close look at them, we may find that they are closely related to each other. NDI requires the context of negation to be present. SAI also requires negative constituents to be present. In this respect, NDI and SAI are very similar. Their major differences are that the former is optional and occurs only in certain dialects, while the latter is obligatory and is not restricted to certain dialects or contexts. In this respect, the latter is a more general rule than the former. Despite these seeming differences, NDI and SAI have some characteristics in common. First of all, it seems clear that the speaker uses NDI constructions instead of uninverted ones to give special emphasis on particular constituents. In other words, I think that a speaker who uses NDI constructions is likely to prefer the NDI construction to its uninverted counterpart when he intends to negate and emphasize the noun phrase following the negative element not. NDI and SVI are similar in that in the former, the inversion is related to the negative element before the noun phrase, whereas in the latter, it is related to the preposed locational or directional adverbial. It seems that in the former, the inversion has a close relation to the function ‘emphasis.’ However, in the latter, it does not have any relation to emphasis. As for the movement of the verb to the front of the subject in the SVI construction, I think of two causes. One is that the movement of locatives to the sentence-initial position is not normal in English, so this kind of movement should give the speaker that the locatives are not used in their normal use. The other is that the moved locative has a tendency to keep its original coherent relation with the verb, thus attracting the verb near the locative even after the movement. This latter cause is supported by Yang (1986), who calls this phenomenon ‘the Verb-Corepredicate Neighborhood Principle.’ Both NDI and SVI are optional, not obligatory.