A Two-Level Grammar of Nominal Potential Lexical Structure, Syntactic Slots, and the Determiner Status of NOT

This monograph develops a two-level architecture for grammatical description in which (i) a lexical module computes category formation, phrase-internal selection, and headed structure, while (ii) a syntactic module computes sentence roles and the slot families that license constituents into those roles. The empirical focus is English NOT. Standard analyses assimilate not to clausal negation or to a dedicated functional head; however, not productively combines with diverse non-clausal materials (infinitivals, subordinate clauses used as arguments, PPs, APs, and participial phrases) whenever those materials function as nominal candidates in the syntactic role system. I formalize this generalization by defining nominal potential as a syntactic licensing property, and I split the traditional notion “NP” into NP_lex (noun-headed phrases computed by the lexical module) and NP_syn (any phrase with nominal potential in the syntactic module). NOT is then modeled as a syntactic determiner (Det_syn) that targets NP_syn and returns NP_syn. The analysis predicts the core distributional asymmetries (e.g., not the cat vs. *the not cat), allows limited recursion (not (not X)), avoids competition with lexical determiners, and yields a compact BNF grammar with an explicit lexical–syntactic interface. The framework also clarifies why uniform NP/DP implementations often overgenerate by positing silent nominal structure, and it provides a coherent perspective on diachronic changes in negation and nominalization as expansions of the NP_syn inventory and its operator system.