The Position Of Sentential Negation In English And Chakma (original) (raw)
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A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation, i.e., every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the form of negative elements, but the position of negative elements is also subject to cross-linguistic variation. Moreover, languages also differ in terms of the number of manifestations of negative morphemes: in some languages negation is realized by a single word or morpheme, in other languages by multiple morphemes. The syntax of negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of (negative) polarity. In short, and leaving the formal discussion for later, negative polarity items (NPIs) are items whose distribution is limited to a number of contexts, which in some sense all count as negative. NPIs surface in various kinds of environments and may also vary in terms of the restrictions they impose on their licensing contexts and the type of licensing relation. Therefore, studying NPIs provides more insight not only into the nature of such context-sensitive elements, but also into the syntax of negation itself. Finally, it should be mentioned that the distinction between negative elements and NPIs is not always that clear-cut. In many languages negative indefinites, quite often referred to as n-words (after Laka 1990) appear to be semantically negative in certain constructions, while exhibiting NPIlike behavior in other configurations. The same may also apply to negative markers in some languages. This chapter aims at providing an overview of the most important recent findings and insights gained in the study of the syntax of negation and polarity.
Sentential Negation in English and Izon Languages
Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, Vol. 2, Issue 4 , 2020
This paper is a contrastive study of Sentential Negation in English and Izon languages. Contact language situations have given rise not only to the influences of one language over the other but also to the differences between the structures of the two languages in contact and the likely learning difficulties which an L1 learner of a second language may likely encounter in learning the structure of the L2. Thus, the data for this study were sourced from competent native speakers of the Ogbe-Ijo dialect of the Izon language and a contrastive approach was adopted using the Chomskyan's Government and Binding theory as a theoretical framework with a view to identifying the structural variations, hierarchy of difficulties and the likely learning problems an Izon learner of English as a second language may encounter at the level of Negation. It discovers that there were obvious parametric variations between the English and Izon languages at the levels of do insertion and the negative particle not among others. It then recommends that conscious efforts should be made by teachers and Izon learners / speakers of English as a second language at the level of realisation of negation in English as a second language.
The morpho-syntactic nature of the negative marker - Chapter 8 in The Oxford Handbook of Negation
The Oxford Handbook of Negation, ed. by V. Déprez & M.T. Espinal , 2020
PRE-PRINT DRAFT https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830528.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198830528-e-4 This chapter is dedicated to the morpho-syntactic properties of markers of sentential negation, and to the relation between such properties and other aspects of the syntax of negation. It reviews the results of cross-linguistic research and describes the different forms of negative markers (affixes, particles, auxiliary verbs, complementizers). It also discusses a number of correlations between the form of the sentential negative marker and more general structural aspects (doubling, pre- vs. postverbal negation, presence of Negative Concord).
2017
This very rich and comprehensive monograph presents a study of the expression of negation in a large array of languages, mostly but not exclusively from the Indo-European family. Henriëtte de Swart's aim is to provide an analysis of the cross-linguistic variation found with respect to negation, using a model based on Optimality Theory (OT). The choice of this model is motivated by its applicability to the syntax-semantics interface, that is, it is said to offer a unified perspective on both the syntactic and semantic contributions of negation, or the speaker (production) and hearer (interpretation) contributions in negative forms/meanings. As such, the book embarks on a clearly innovative enterprise, which encourages the reader to view the strikingly diverse phenomena involved in negation from a different perspective. Wide-scope OT accounts are-to my knowledge-extremely scarce ; and although recent contributions to the study of negation, both from a syntactic and from a semantic point of view, have added to our understanding of the phenomenon, few researchers have attempted to tackle the complex issue of the syntax-semantics interface of negation, especially when working within a large-scale typological investigation. De Swart's book is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. The first two chapters provide the empirical and formal background. Chapter 1, ' Negation in a cross-linguistic perspective ', presents an overview of the central issues of negation. It provides an in-depth discussion of typological and diachronic variation in sentential negation. It also introduces the muchdebated question of the nature of negative expressions. In the existing literature, negative expressions have been assigned various interpretations, having been analysed as negative quantifiers, indefinites in the scope of negation, or even as ambiguous between the two readings (see the references in the book). De Swart argues that 'n-words ' (Laka 1990
A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation. Every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of a certain sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the position of negative elements, also the form of negative elements and the interpretation of sentences that consist of multiple negative elements are subject to broad cross-linguistic variation. The study to the behaviour of sentential negation has therefore strongly been guided by the question as to what determines the possible ways that sentential negation can manifest itself. A conclusion of the article will be that the behaviour of negation in natural language strongly deviates from what intuitively might be expected.
Negation from a typological perspective
Functionally, negation – or more broadly polarity – is a type of modality, as it modifies the reality of a situation. Structurally, it is mostly some kind of inflection marked on the predicate. However, negation is neither a typical modality nor a typical inflection. Functionally, it interferes with quantification. Structurally, it interacts with marking on other constituents and may fuse with other morphemes. In a given language, its structural correlates can be so disparate as to obscure the unity of the functional domain. With respect to the main verb, negation can be marked analytically or synthetically. In both cases, it can fuse with other modal markers. Negative marking can also fuse with existential predicates. Equational clauses also tend to have a separate pattern, as do imperatives. Different languages can have double negation on both the predicate and a nominal constituent, special marking of such a constituent, or negate only the nominal constituent. This is again different from negation with scope over a constituent which is negated contrastively. Then we find differences between negated main and dependent clauses. Finally, we will look at affirmative and negative markers with clause function, so called pro-clauses, and their scope. The talk will highlight the complexity of negation and provide a better understanding for its description, teaching, and acquisition.
UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 10 (1998) Negation, polarity and V positions in English *
2013
The distribution with respect to negation of verbs and auxiliaries in English needs a new analysis. Using data from the behaviour of modals, we argue for three negation positions: Echoic, Polarity, and Adverbial. The main claim we make is that Polarity Negation and Echoic Negation (and their Positive counterparts) have a categorial feature [V]. This fact explains why a verb cannot, but an auxiliary may, occur higher than Pol[NEG]. Soft constraints on the distribution of the Infl with which each [V] head must be associated determine the PF positions of the inflected heads.
Negation, polarity and V positions in English
1998
The distribution with respect to negation of verbs and auxiliaries in English needs a new analysis. Using data from the behaviour of modals, we argue for three negation positions: Echoic, Polarity, and Adverbial. The main claim we make is that Polarity Negation and Echoic Negation (and their Positive counterparts) have a categorial feature [V]. This fact explains why a verb cannot, but an auxiliary may, occur higher than Pol [NEG]. Soft constraints on the distribution of the Infl with which each [V] head must be associated determine the PF positions of the inflected heads. * We are grateful to John Anderson, Keith Brown, John Harris and Dick Hudson for discussion.
Every natural language has some lexical element at its disposal to reverse the truth-conditional content of a sentence. Sometimes, sentences are rendered negative by means of a negative marker, sometimes by means of a negative indefinite, and sometimes even by a combination of both of them. It turns out that the syntactic and semantic behaviour of these negative markers and indefinites is much more complex than may be initially thought. In this chapter, I discuss the general syntactic and semantic properties of both negative markers and negative indefinites and I focus on three particular phenomena that shed more light on their intricate syntactic and semantic properties: negative concord, split-scope readings, and the co-occurrence of multiple negative markers in a single clause.