'Won't you do as I ask?', but 'Will you not do as I ask?' 'Haven't I seen you before?', but 'Have I not seen you before?' 'Didn't she say she was coming?', but 'Did she not say she was coming?' but (also)вЂ™ ' Oxford Dictionaries - You bring up an interesting point about the question form, and as you say 'cannot' doesn't work there, but for the very good reason that in question form when the auxiliary is not contracted, 'not' comes after the inverted subject: The two-word form is better only in a construction in which not is part of a set phrase, such as вЂnot only. 'Both the one-word form cannot and the two-word form can not are acceptable, but cannot is more common (in the Oxford English Corpus, three times as common). whose presence paralyses the poor victim and he or she can not move the darn leg. Only then it means that you are possibly so huge as to make shaking a leg physically impossible by your presence in the tiny room.

However you are correct to state that your example is also correct grammatically. 'Can you not shake your leg when IвЂ™m in the room? You can just not shake, ok? -> You can not shake it.'ДЇirst, you probably debate a permission to shake my leg when you are in the room, which should be expressed with the word 'may' rather than the physical possibility expressed by 'can'.

In these sentences the 'not' negated the exclusion expressed by the word 'only' rather than the possibility expressed by вЂњcan'. I can not only teach mathematics but also economics and English. The two example sentences where you wrote 'can' and 'not' side by side have nothing in common with 'cannot':

Is the word cannot one word