Negative raising

This is the topic of my BA thesis in English Linguistics at the University of Vienna. It is concerned with the topic of neg-raising: what is it, how and how frequently is it used, and why do speakers use it? To answer these questions, I carried out a corpus study across several corpora, both synchronically and diachronically, and concluded the paper with a discussion on purpose, drawing from both the literature as well as my own ideas, supported by the results of the aforementioned corpus study. In order for all of this to make sense, a clear definition of neg-raising - and therefore also of negation in general - had to be established, along with an overview of the different approaches to neg-raising commonly found in the literature.