While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

This volume offers reviews of cross-linguistic research on the major classic issues in negation, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume will be an essential reference on the topic of negation for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of negating a sentence. Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained set of choices available to the particular grammars of these languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of sentential negation.

In this book, Doris Penka delivers a cross-linguistic, unified analysis of the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites, as in the expressions nobody, nothing, no (as determiner), never and nowhere and their counterparts in other languages. While it is standard to assume that negative indefinites behave like negative quantifiers, the author argues that these expressions are not inherently negative and are only licensed by a covert negation.In an analysis motivated by three phenomena found in the structure and semantics of negative indefinites in different languages - namely negative concord (in which multiple occurrences of negative constituents express a single negation), split readings (in which negative and indefinite parts take scope independently of each other), and the limited distribution of negative indefinites in Scandinavian languages - Doris Penka considers data from a wide range of languages and reviews the mostrecent literature on the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites. Her book will interest all linguists working on negation in particular and the syntax-semantics interface more generally.

Demonstrates sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework, showing parallelism between negative and interrogative sentences.