Feature GB140: Is verbal predication marked by the same negator as all of the following types of predication: locational, existential and nominal?

Patrons: Hedvig Skirgård

Description ⇫

Summary

This feature pertains only to the negative marker itself, be it an independent particle, verb, auxiliary, clitic or affix. This feature covers three kinds of non-verbal negation: locational (The dog is not in the kitchen.), existential (Hogwarts does not exist.) or nominal predication (Ursula is not a witch.).

Procedure

  1. Find the section in the available descriptive literature that deals with negation.
  2. Find the sections that describe locational, existential and nominal predication.
  3. If at least one of these three has a different negator from verbal negation, code this feature as 0.
  4. If you can only find information on one of these three, and it is expressed with the same negator as verbal negation, code as ?.
  5. If the source is extensive and only brings up 2 out of 3 of the functions, we can probably safely assume that if the third one was different it would have bene mentioned. Therefore we can code 1. However if the description is minimal, we should code ? because the author could just have missed the third kind of function.
  6. If you cannot find information on any of these three categories of non-verbal negation, code as ?.

Examples

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

Standard negation in Turkish is marked by the suffix -mA (a). Copula sentences, including locational (b) and nominal predication (c), have a special negative auxiliary deǧil that inflects for tense and person/number (Kornfilt 1997: 123–124). Turkish is coded as 0 for this feature.

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

b.  (ben) ev-de    deǧil-im
I     home-LOC NEG.COP-1SG
‘I am not at home.’ (Kornfilt 1997: 124)

c.  (ben) hasta deǧil-im
I     sick  NEG.COP-1SG
‘I am not sick.’ (Kornfilt 1997: 124)

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.

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

References

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


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0 absent 796
1 present 794
? Not known 786
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Values ⇫

Name Glottocode Family Macroarea Contributor Value Source Comment