not in the first place

in this article, i provide a unified explanation for two puzzling phenomena concerning sentence-initial negation: the ban on true negative imperatives that is attested in many languages and the ban on sole negative markers in sentence-initial position in v-to-c languages. i argue that both phenomena can be explained once it is assumed after han (2001) that operators encoding the illocutionary force of a speech act take scope from matrix c∘ and may not be outscoped by negation.