A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§5 Scope of negation 157

The difference in meaning is considerable: [a] entails that the number of people who
believed him is relatively small, but certainly [b] does not (we might be talking, for
example, about a major political figure in a country with a huge population, where
there are many people who didn't believe him and many others who did).

In [a] the negation applies to many: the number of people who believed him was

not large. We say then that many falls within the scope of the negation - or that

the negation has scope over many.

In [b], however, the negation does not apply to many: it does not have scope over

it. On the contrary, the quantification expressed by many has scope over the nega­

tion, since it gives the size of the set of people who had the property that they

didn't believe him.

The same kind of contrast is found in the following pairs, where again the item

with double underlining has scope over the one with single underlining:

[24] i a. I didn 't omit my name deliberately.

ii a. Yo u needn't tell anyone about it.

b. I deliberately didn 't omit my name.

b. Yo u mustn 't tell anyone about it.

In [ia] the negative has scope over the adjunct deliberately: omitting my name

was not something I made a point of doing. In [ib], by contrast, deliberately has

scope over the negation: I made a point of not omitting my name.

In [iia] the negation has scope over the modal auxiliary need, expressing deontic

necessity: "It isn't necessary for you to tell anyone about it". In [iib], however,

modal must, likewise expressing deontic necessity, has scope over the negation:

"It is necessary that you not tell anyone about it".

Note that in cases where some element has scope over the negation, it is normally

possible to find a paraphrase in which the negative marker is located in a subordi­

nate clause.

For [23b], for example, we have There were many people [who didn't believe

him].

For [24ib]: I deliberately chose [not to omit my name].

For [24iib], Yo u are required [not to tell anyone about it]; and so on.

There is a significant degree of correlation between semantic scope and gram­

matical order. Very often, a negative element has scope over what follows but is

within the scope of elements that precede. For example, in [23] and [24i] the nega­

tive marker in [a] precedes the element over which it has scope and in [b] follows

the element which has scope over it. But the correlation is clearly only partial. In

[24ii], for example, there is no difference in grammatical structure between [a] and

[b]: the scope difference is attributable to specific properties of the modal auxiliaries

must and need.