LINB18H3 Lecture 10: Lecture 10
Lecture 10
Negation
Negation
• Negation in English is marked by words such as not, never, no, etc. and affixes (prefixes
and suffixes that attach to words) such as – n’t, un–, non–, etc.
o He has not arrived.
o They never eat out.
o No employees sent in their forms.
o She didn’t receive the letter.
o You were unhappy with the wallpaper.
o She’s studying non-conventional medicine.
Meaning of Negation
• In terms of meaning, negation indicates that some part of the sentence is NOT TRUE. For
example; the sentence “Bill didn’t break the vase” means that something about the
positive equivalent “Bill broke the vase” is NOT TRUE. This can happen in different ways:
o It was someone else who broke the vase.
o Bill handled the vase but it was not broken.
o Bill broke something other than the vase; e.g. a dish.
• Any of these situations would be enough for us to say that “he didn’t break the vase”.
• Notice that negation does not indicate that the opposite is true.
o For instance; “The red team didn’t beat the blue team” does not mean that the
blue team won; since it could have been a tie or the competition could’ve been
cancelled altogether.
Polarity
• We call the positive/negative contrast POLARITY; clauses can have positive polarity or
negative polarity.
• Positive polarity is the default; clauses with positive polarity are simpler (containing
fewer items). Clauses with negative polarity usually need extra material.
Negative Clauses
• Having a negative element (e.g. not) inside a clause doesn’t always give the clause
negative polarity, so there are three tests for polarity:
▪ Test 1: “not even”
▪ Test 2: “so”, “neither”, and “nor”
▪ Test 3: Reversed polarity tags
Document Summary
In terms of meaning, negation indicates that some part of the sentence is not true. For example; the sentence bill didn"t break the vase means that something about the positive equivalent bill broke the vase is not true. Polarity: we call the positive/negative contrast polarity; clauses can have positive polarity or negative polarity, positive polarity is the default; clauses with positive polarity are simpler (containing fewer items). Clauses with negative polarity usually need extra material. Test 1: not even : while negative clauses can be followed by constituents introduced by not even , this is not possible with positive clauses, a constituent introduced by not even cannot follow a positive clause. Subclausal negation: while negative elements often make clauses negative, this is not always the case; clauses sometimes remain positive according to our tests, * they were unimpressed, not even a bit. (cf. They were not impressed, not even a bit. : they were unimpressed and so were we. (cf.
