[-NEG] NegP and Dummy Verb Insertion

Abstract

It is a widely held view that the elements appearing in the context of do-insertion in English and suru-insertion in Japanese are dummy verbs with no semantic content. The background assumption is that certain morphological requirements trigger the insertion operations. This article provides some cases of suru-insertion where no clear morphological motivation is found for its application. We show that suru in those cases seems to play a semantically substantial role. An attempt is made to account for suru-insertion of this kind by postulating a Neg head which has a [-NEG] feature.