[Multilingual Monday] Finally, negation!

[aadroma]

Finally I do my article on negation that I started -- good Lord, before I left for Japan!!

Comments

[robearal]

Then you have the quantity of negation: English allows only negation form (the double-negative restriction), whereas Spanish requires all negate-able elements to be in the negative form. "Juan no da ninguna cosa a nadie." [John doesn't give anything (nothing) to anybody (nobody)]

Korean

[muckefuck]

When you mentioned "negative verbs", I thought you were referring to negative auxiliaries rather than negative morphemes in the verb complex. Korean has several constructions for negating the predicate, but one of the most common is the "indefinite" suffix -지 /ci/ attached to the main verb followed by the negative auxiliary 않다 /anhta/. (In origin, this is simply the negative prefix 안 /an/ plus the all-purpose auxiliary 하다 /hata/, but the etymology probably isn't transparent to most speakers.)

For instance:

갔읍니다 /kapnita/ "[he] went" > 가지 않았읍니다 /kaci anhsupnita/ "[he] did not go"

Note how the tense infix (았 /ass/) and the formal polite endings all attach to the auxiliary, not the main verb. As it happens, you can also negate this verb by prefixing 안 /an/ (i.e. 안갔읍니다 /ankassupnita/) but that doesn't work in all cases.

English

[muckefuck]

Believe it or not, Raj, but English actually has inflectional negation, too. Hunt down the paper "Cliticization vs. inflection: English n't" from Arnold Zwicky and Geoffrey Pullum. (Sorry, couldn't find a free-access version on the Web.) In it, they lay out clear syntactic criteria for distinguishing clitics (like [i]s, [ha]ve, [ha]d, etc.) from inflections (like -s, -(e)d, etc.) and demonstrate that English n't is an inflection like past tense -(e)d rather than a clitic like 'd from had.

[muckefuck]

Oh, and a little cavil on your typology: I don't see any reason to divide up your first two categories the way you do. It's bass-ackwards to say that Spanish "uses 'no' for negation" rather than saying that, in some languages, the word for "no" has the same form as the phrasal/sentential negative particle. After all, there's no significant difference between Spanish negation with no and Welsh negation with dim, except that Welsh speakers don't use dim on its own to negate statements. (Famously, they repeat the verb, e.g. Oes chwant bwyd arnat ti? "Are you hungry?" [Lit. "Is there want of food on you?"] Does. "Isn't".) This strikes me as an incidental detail, not a fundamental difference between the syntax of the two languages.

[aadroma]

A few reasons:

A.) Then I end up with a GIANT BLOCK PARAGRAPH with the examples cited, making my claim of "negative verbs" being so frequent seem sarcastic more than anything.

But more importantly...

B.) For me there's the mere simplicity of it that sets it off as different than your example. You just use the all-purpose "no" in Spanish, or "ez" in Basque for instance, and you've just negated. For me it was a fascination point from the very point of WHEN I learned that you can just attach a "no" that gave me my first instance of, "God this is simple; why doesn't English do this??"

Hence I merely grouped occasions that act nearly identically, and to me the Welsh dim and the Spanish no function SIMILARLY, but not being able to to use dim by itself is a differentiation point for me, just as in my mind (perhaps not yours, and I respect that even if I don't agree) German nicht isn't the same as the Basque or Spanish examples above either. It's also why, for example, Hindi is not seen anywhere here (as more's actually going on during

[muckefuck]

(A) Or you could be more selective in your examples and mention at the end "Similarly for languages X, Y, and Z".

(B) I can see how the classification makes sense from a personal-historical point-of-view, but from a morphosyntactic pov, none of the languages classed together works "identically". For instance, both German and Chinese actually have two common negative particles apiece, but their distribution is completely different: German kein negates noun phrases (e.g. Ich verstehe nicht BUT Ich verstehe kein Wort), whereas Chinese 沒 méi negates perfective verbs (e.g. 沒懂你在說什麼 méi dǒng nǐ zài shūo shémme "I haven't understood anything you're saying") and the existential verb 有 yǒu. In comparison, the fact that the Chinese say 不是 búshì for "no" rather than 不 bù [note tone; it only changes from 4th to 2nd before another 4th tone] alone is trivial

[aadroma]

A.) Right, and then you get on my case for assuming that people know mentioned languages. I can't win with you, remember. :: laugh ::

B.) I can see your point and can certianly understand the argument as they negate different elements, and it might have been smarter to seperate as to WHAT'S negated rather than a PHYSICAL similarity (placement and similarity to other words). Kein I debated on including, but then the artcile started to become blurred with another article I wrote on things existing/not existing that I wrote a while back and grew exponentionally.

Yeah, French, Turkish, English, and Arabic nor any others fit into neat categories at all -- even the ones here don't by just focusing on PHYSICAL similarities, but part of the point of this gets the ball rolling on similar or different languages.