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Abstract Abstract: While introducing Rizzi’s (1990) revision of the Empty Category Principle, this article explores the syntax of negation in both English and Chinese under the framework of the NegP Hypothesis formulated in Pollock (1989). The analysis indicates that the two languages differ from each other with respect to the position of negators: the negator not in English is base-generated in the head of NegP whereas its Chinese counterpart bu occupies the specifier of NegP. This difference gives rise to the language-specific behaviors concerning the co-occurrence of negator with tense and aspect markers. In English, due to the blocking effect of the Neg head not, the affixal tense markers cannot be lowered to the lexical verbs and do-support is thus applied to save the stranded tense. In Chinese, however, the head of NegP is empty and the Asp lowers to the verb, but the trace left by Asp-lowering cannot be properly governed by the Neg head then. Consequently, the negative marker bu is incompatible with the (lowered) Asp marker. It is concluded that this study offers a better empirical coverage of the negation facts in both languages and captures the cross-linguistic differences in the meantime.
Key words: negator; NegP Hypothesis; Empty Category Principle; proper head government
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