REMARKS ON NEGATIVE ISLANDS

This article critically examines Rizzi's (1990, 1992) syntactic accoun t of negative islands, originally noted by Ross (1984). We demonstrate that, contrary to Rizzi's and Ross's claims, the distinctions between referential and nonreferential expressions and between arguments and adjuncts do no: play any direct role in determining the acceptability status of negative sentences involving extraction. We argue that the p henomenon is primarily controlled by a ban against extracting the focu s of negation (irrespective of its. referentiality and argument/adjunc t status) out of the scope of the negative element, and by a pragmatic factor that bans questions that solicit uninformative answers.