Neg-raising: Focus and Implicatures

Abstract

This paper offers a ‘feature-based’ account of neg-raising (NR) phenomenon. This account integrates Alternative Semantics for focus into the grammatical view of scalar implicatures (SIs). I argue that the derivation of an NR or non-NR reading is determined by the distributions of two features, namely, the SI feature [+σ ] of NR predicates and the [+F] feature of focused items.