Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker “non” (“not”) has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced.

中文翻译：

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惊奇否定句的句法：以咒骂否定为例

咒骂否定在人类语言中很普遍。尽管已经提出了许多关于它的语义、语用和句法假设，但它仍然令人费解。特别需要面对两个问题：(i) 否定得到空洞解释的主要是句法的上下文是什么？(ii) EN 是一种在语法上不同于标准否定的现象还是它们是同一种？在这篇文章中，我将通过调查意大利语 EN 的案例，即 Surprise Negation Sentences，提供实证和理论论证，以证明 EN 源自特定的句法配置。更具体地说，我将建议意大利否定标记“non”（“not”）在语法中具有双重解释：（i）当它在 v*P 阶段合并到 TP 区域时，它给出了标准的否定解释，颠倒了句子的真值条件；(ii) 当它在 CP 域中合并并且 v*P 阶段已经关闭时，它给出了 Snegs 中所示的咒骂解释。从这个角度来看，否定的咒骂阅读只是对引入否定的句法上下文的一种反映。