A note on “Postposed main phrases”

Extract

In his article “Postposed main phrases: an English rule for the Romance subjunctive,” Canadian “Journal of Linguistics, 14:1, pp. 3-30, Dwight Bolinger discusses some aspects of the rule of Absorbed-negation, more commonly known as Not-transportation or Neg-transportation. It is the aim of this paper to deal wi th those structures which are related by Neg-transportation in Spanish with respect to the statements made by Bolinger in the above article.

Neg-transportation as discussed in the literature is the rule which transports a negation originally found in the underlying structure of an embedded clause to the matrix. Bolinger thinks that the negation “belongs to the main verb, …, as much as to the verb in the noun clause” (ft. 14, pp. 23-24). Interesting as this is, I will not argue it here but will take issue with the statement made on page 23: “Native speakers of Spanish confirm the idea of absorbed negation when they report that 226 is closer in meaning to 227 than the subjunctive 228 would be:

226. No creo que es así.
227. Creo que no es así.
228. No creo que sea así.”