How to Syntax IV: Not that I know of

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts showing how I think about a syntax problem when I first notice it. It is not the purpose of this series to present polished answers. Rather the intention is to present the process at it very beginning to show the kinds of initial steps that a syntactician goes through. 

For these posts, I typically constrain myself to less than three hours of time to maintain the newness of the experience. Furthermore, I also try to restrain the amount of rewriting that I do, so the whole thing has a stream of consciousness feel to it.

Just yesterday, somebody wrote to me on Whatsapp, the dialogue is as follows:

JD: are you going to be involved with the LSA meeting in new orleans in any capacity?

Me: Not that I am aware of.

Me: That expression “not that I am aware of” is a super cool expression.

Background Monitor

This process of finding interesting constructions is typical. I have a low-level mental monitor processing all the language that I hear or produce. It is constantly running in the background, so if anything of interest turns up, the monitor starts ringing and flashing and I go to check what is causing the commotion.

In this case, I noticed that the negation “not” is directly modifying a that-clause, which looks like it contains a gap (after the preposition “of”). I have never before thought explicitly about this kind of pattern before, despite years and years of thinking about negation. So I decided that there might be something interesting. 

So right now, I am thinking through a construction that I have never thought about before. We are catching the birth of a syntactic analysis.

More Examples

My first impulse is to find more examples of a similar nature, to try to get some grasp of what is going on. You can do this on your own, but nowadays you can also use the internet and Google searches to find more data. 

I decide to search: “Not that I” on Google.

There are lots of hits for “Not that I know of”, many of which are online grammar discussions of its meaning. But I also find hits like the following:

1. Not that I'm a big boxing guy, but I love this video because it's 90sec of people pretending they watch boxing. (https://x.com/NotThatTomGreen/status/1966174237263360279)

But this seems like a different construction. First, there is no gap in the clause modified by negation. Second, the meaning seems to be different. The meaning in (1) is something like “although” or “even though”. But that is not at all the meaning of “not that I am aware of.”

So I continue to try to find other kinds of examples that are parallel to “not that I am aware of”, but with different vocabulary items. Here are a few examples:

2. a. Not that I know of.

b. Not that I’ve seen.

c. Not that I’ve heard.

d. Not that I can recall.

e. Not that I can tell.

f. Not that I can think of.

Here is an example from the internet:

3. Are there times in your own experience that you’re more likely to turn to reading or writing poetry? Not that I can think of, as everything makes me want to write poetry and everything makes me want to read it. (https://lighthousewriters.org/blog/there-poem-everyone-questions-colorado-poet-laureate-andrea-gibson)

The subject can vary too:

4. a. Not that we are aware of.

b. Not that they are aware of.

c. Not that the police are aware of.

All the cases so far have been complement gaps, either the direct object of the verb or the complement of a prepositional phrase. But it is also possible (although less frequent) to find subject gaps:

5. He has no infection present - not that has been found. Never had COVID.

(https://community.prostatecanceruk.org/posts/t29210-Dad---with-very-high-PSA)

6. Veterinarian's Assistant: Has your pet been scooting or showing any signs of discomfort or pain? 

Customer: Not that has been noticed

(https://www.justanswer.com/veterinary/o9o3o-red-rectum-surrounding-area-just-noticed-yesterday.html)

If I were to pursue this topic, I would find many more examples, even hundreds of them, to really get a feel for what is going on.

Paraphrase

Let us now consider the meaning of these expressions. We will address meaning through the use of paraphrase, which is meant to articulate the meaning in a transparent way. Consider the interchange:

7. a. Will Mary be there?

b. Not that I am aware of.

In this case, (7b) seems to have the following paraphrase:

8. If Mary will be there, I am not aware of it.

Or perhaps,

9. Mary’s being there is something I am not aware of.

Or perhaps,

10. Mary’s being there is not something/anything that I am aware of.

The last paraphrase starts to have the grammatical structure of (7b), in that there is a negation and a that clause. The paraphrase suggests that (7b) is a reduced form of:

11. THAT IS not SOMETHING/ANYTHING that I am aware of.

In this structure, “that is” is not pronounced (shown by capital letters), and “something/anything” is not pronounced, leaving only “not that I am aware of.”

This kind of paraphrase also works well for (2b):

12. a. Are the students cheating?

b. Not that I have seen.

Indeed, (12b) can be paraphrased as:

13. That is not something/anything that I have seen.

Basic Combinatorics

There are all kinds of basic combinations that need to be tested for acceptability. For example, the analysis in (11), automatically gives rise to many combinatorial questions.

14. Will Mary be there?

15. a. Not that I am aware of.

b. *Not which I am aware of.

c. *Not something I am aware of.

d. *Not anything I am aware of.

e. *That is not that I am aware of.

(15a) is the acceptable construction we are studying. (15b) replaces the complementizer “that” with the relative pronoun “which”, and the result is unacceptable. (15b) is a bit surprising because normally the two alternate:

16. the thing that/which I saw

(15c,d) attempt to make the head of the relative clause in (11) overt, and the result is unacceptable. (15e) attempts to make the matrix clause “that is” overt, while leaving the head of the relative clause covert.

The unacceptability of (15b-d) are somewhat surprising on the analysis of (11). So any analysis adopting (11) would have to explain them.

Gap Mechanics I: Resumptive Pronoun

Any time you are dealing with a construction involving gaps of any kind, there are a number of different kinds of diagnostics you can run.

In all the case above, it is impossible to fill the gap with a pronoun (maintaining the same interpretation):

17. a. Not that I know of (*it).

b. Not that I’ve seen (*it).

c. Not that I’ve heard (*it).

d. Not that I can think of (*it).

This fact is parallel to what is found in the paraphrases:

18. a. That is not something that I know of (*it).

b. That is not something that I’ve seen (*it).

c. That is not something that I’ve heard (*it).

d. That is not something that I can think of (*it).

The parallelism between (17) and (18) provides a bit of support for the analysis in (11).

Gap Mechanics II: Locality

Generally gaps can have non-local antecedents:

19. a. What are you thinking of?

b. What did you say you are thinking of?

The question is whether non-local antecedents are possible for the “not that I am aware of” construction as well. Here is an attempt:

20. A: Are the students cheating?

B. *Not that I said that I have seen. 

B. *Not that I said that I am aware of.

B. *Not that I think that have seen.

B. *Not that I think that I am aware of.

These cases sound very awkward, and much less acceptable than the paraphrases:

21. a. That is not something that I said that I have seen.

b. That is not something that I said that I am aware of.

As a preliminary conclusion, it appears that the construction does not allow long distance dependencies. That constraint deserves to be investigated much more systematically.

Negative Polarity Items

Any time a sentence involves negation, there is always the question of whether that negation can license a negative polarity item. For example,

22. I didn’t see anybody.

In this case the negation licenses the NPI “anybody”. 

Now consider the following examples:

23. a. Not that anybody here is aware of.

b. Not that anybody here has seen.

c. Not that anybody here has noticed.

These examples seem acceptable. Therefore, we conclude that negation can license an embedded NPI. 

For completeness, we need now to check whether the same facts hold for the paraphrases:

24. a. That is not something/anything that anybody here is aware of.

b. That is not something/anything that anybody here has seen.

c. That is not something/anything that anybody here has noticed.

These examples also seem acceptable.

As you learn more and more syntax, you will learn more and more construction specific tests, like the distribution of NPIs, which you can then apply when analyzing various constructions.

Conclusion

Here are the steps in an initial syntactic analysis that I have outlined:

25. a. Background monitor

b. More examples

c. Paraphrase

d. Basic Combinatorics

e. Gap Mechanics I: Filling

f. Gap Mechanics 2: Locality

g. Negative polarity items

Clearly, much more work on this construction is needed. But the beginning process, summarized in (25) is fairly standard for syntactic research.