The generation of negative inversion (NI) has been puzzles to the English grammar. One prevalent approach for the construction is a configurational, movement one that contributes the inversion force to the so-called NEG criterion as well as to the interaction of functional projections and movement operations. This paper reviews the basic properties of NI with naturally occurring data (corpus). Our corpus examples indicate that the NI is controlled not by syntactic operations such as movement but is constructionally determined. The inversion force cannot be originated from simple lexical entries or syntactically. The constructional constraints of the NI, a subtype of other general inversion constructions, allow us to link its form and idiosyncratic semantic and pragmatic functions as well.
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