This paper proposes an analysis of corrective but sentences (e.g. Max doesn’t eat spinach but chard) that parallels Wu’s (2022a, 2022b) analysis of either…or… sentences, and raises a novel view that there is a use of negation that requires but (parallel to either that requires or). I argue that there are two positions for this negation. Either position may be pronounced, but only the higher position is interpreted. In addition, ellipsis deletes repeated material in the second conjunct, leading to the appearance that negation is higher than it actually is. Ellipsis leads to the consequence that when negation appears to be non-adjacent to the apparent but-coordination (e.g. Max doesn’t eat [spinach but chard]), negation takes surface scope; but when negation appears to be adjacent to the apparent but-coordination (e.g. Max eats not [spinach but chard]), negation can take higher scope than its surface position. This analysis is consonant with previous proposals for the syntax of focus-sensitive operators such as the Question-particle and only, suggesting that all focus-sensitive operators, as is exemplified by negation here, may have two positions in a sentence. My syntactic analysis draws evidence from a mix of domains, including syntax, semantics and a prosodic experiment, following a tradition in the literature that looks to prosody for evidence for the syntactic structure (e.g. Bresnan 1971; Clemens and Coon 2018; Clemens 2021). This prosodic experiment also demonstrates the mutual reinforcement of syntactic theory and prosodic experimentation: not only can we draw evidence for syntactic theories from prosody, but syntactic theories also lay the foundation for investigations of syntax-prosody mapping.
