English fail to as a periphrastic negative: An FDG account

The verb fail, preceding to + infinitive, has two senses. One presupposes active attempt; the other lacks this presupposition and approximates in meaning to simple negation. Examining all relevant occurrences in the British National Corpus, the paper considers the second sense of fail to in the framework of FDG. An initial analysis of the second sense as involving a subject-raising verb is abandoned in favour of seeing the relevant use of fail to as a periphrastic negative. Close corpus analysis reveals that fail to obeys various collocational restrictions pertaining to dynamicity, telicity and positive semantic prosody. This leads into a case study of fail to be, which reveals several additional facts. In the FDG-theoretical section, the first sense of fail is analysed as involving a lexical verb taking a Configurational Property as its complement and the second as corresponding to a Negative operator (Neg) on a Configurational Property. The use of fail to in litotes entails two loci for Neg, while the periphrastic use of failure arises from applying Neg to a Lexical Property. The conclusion reflects on possible motivations for the grammaticalization of fail invoking a view of negation as not purely semantic but also as having pragmatic aspects. * The research underlying this paper was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science within the project ‘A comparative perspective on the grammar-discourse interface in English, with special reference to coherence and subjectivity’, no. HUM2007-62220. I wish to thank audiences at the University of Lisbon, at APEAA 29 (University of Aveiro), ESSE9 (University of Aarhus), ICFG13 (University of Westminster, London) and SDAŠ2 (University of Maribor) for their valuable reactions to oral presentations of the material set out in this paper. I also am grateful to the editors of WPFG and to an anonymous reviewer for remarks leading to substantial improvements, as well as to Teresa Fanego and Michael Herslund. I alone am responsible to remaining shortcomings