Feature GB107: Can standard negation be marked by an affix, clitic or modification of the verb?

Patrons: Hedvig Skirgård

Description ⇫

Summary

This feature refers to Standard Negation, i.e. the constructions that mark negation of (at least) dynamic (not-stative) verbal predicates in declarative mood. The marker has to form a phonological unit with the verbal root, be it by affixation, cliticization, suppletion, reduplication, tone, etc. For markers bound to auxiliaries, see GB298. If there is negative marking on the verb and elsewhere (for example by a particle) in the same construction, this is included in this feature. If there is a clitic that attaches to anything in its vicinity, this doesn't count.

Procedure

  1. Find the section in the available descriptive literature that deals with negation.
  2. If suppletion is used, or a marker is described as an affix, a phonologically bound clitic, tone or reduplication and you see no reason to doubt that it is indeed bound, code 1.
  3. If the marker is described as a particle and it is unclear whether it is bound to the verb or not, look into more sources.
  4. If the marker can be bound and can be free (and you are sufficiently convinced that when it is described as bound it is indeed bound), code 1 for this feature and code 1 for GB298 and/or GB299.
  5. If there is more than one construction for marking standard negation, code for all of them.

Examples

Turkish (ISO 639-3: tur, Glottolog: nucl1301)

Standard negation in Turkish is marked using the suffix -mA on the verb (Kornfilt 1997: 123). Turkish is coded as 1 for this feature.

Hasan kitab-ı  oku-ma-dı
Hasan book-ACC read-NEG-PST
‘Hasan didn't read the book.’ (Kornfilt 1997: 123)

Swedish (ISO 639-3: swe, Glottolog: swed1254)

Swedish accomplishes negation with a particle (icke or inte). It is possible for this particle to be phonologically bound to the verb, but it does not qualify for a 1 for this feature because it cliticizes to anything that precedes it - not just verbs. Below are examples from the Swedish dialect Jarssemål (spoken in Järvsö in Hälsingland). All examples are taken from Håkan Franck (1999) via Skigård (2010), with glosses and translation added by patron (also Skirgård). Swedish is coded as 0.

(1) free-standing
Fräsen begrep int dä där, han e.
Hisser understand NEG that there, 3SG.MASK NEG
'The kitty didn't understand that, did he?"

(2) cliticised to verb
Jasså, du Fräsen! Du tyttje=n't ôm främmande du, e.
well.then 2SG Hisser 2SG like=NEG about strangers 2SG NEG
'Well then Kitty, you don't care for strangers do you?"

(3) cliticised to pragmatic particle
Dä ä ju=n't sa långt hem tä ôss, e.
It is PRAG.PART=NEG so far home to us, NEG
'It's not that far home to us, is it?'

Further reading

Croft, William. 1991. The evolution of negation. Journal of Linguistics 27(1). 1–27.

Dahl, Östen. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17. 79–106.

Dahl, Östen. 2010. Typology of negation. In Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The expression of negation, 9–38. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Negative Morphemes. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Position of negative morpheme with respect to subject, object, and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Order of negative morpheme and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Miestamo, Matti. 2013. Symmetric and asymmetric standard negation. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Payne, John R. 1985. Negation. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skirgård, Hedvig 2010. Finns det dubbelnegation i svenska dialekter? Inte.. e i två Hälsingemål (ENG: double negation in Swedish dialects). Ba thesis at Stockholm Univeristy

References

Kornfilt, Jaklin. 1997. Turkish. (Descriptive Grammars Series, Descriptive Grammars.) London: Routledge.


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Name Glottocode Family Macroarea Contributor Value Source Comment