This article critically examines Rizzi's (1990, 1992) syntactic account of negative islands, originally noted by Ross (1984). We demonstrate that, contrary to Rizzi's and Ross's claims, the distinctions between referential and nonreferential expressions and between arguments and adjuncts do not play any direct role in determining the acceptability status of negative sentences involving extraction. We argue that the phenomenon is primarily controlled by a ban against extracting the focus of negation (irrespective of its referentiality and argument/adjunct status) out of the scope of the negative element, and by a pragmatic factor that bans questions that solicit uninformative answers.
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