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Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from otherwise complex systems of animal communication. In many ways, it is negation that makes us human, imbuing us with the capacity to deny, to contradict, to misrepresent, to lie, and to convey irony. The apparent simplicity of logical negation as a one-place operator that toggles truth and falsity belies the intricate complexity of the expression of negation in natural language. Not only do we find negative adverbs, verbs, copulas, quantifiers, and affixes, but the interaction of negation with other operators (including multiple iterations of negation itself) can be exceedingly complex to describe, extending (as first detailed by Otto Jespersen) to negative concord, negative incorporation, and the widespread occurrence of negative polarity items whose distribution is subject to principles of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters in this book survey the patterning of negative utterances in natural languages, spanning such foundational issues as how negative sentences are realized cross-linguistically and how that realization tends to change over time, how negation is acquired by children, how it is processed by adults, and how its expression changes over time. Specific chapters offer focused empirical studies of negative polarity, pleonastic negation, and negative/quantifier scope interaction, as well as detailed examinations of the form and function of sentential negation in modern Romance languages and Classical Japanese.

Grammar --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Negation (Logic) --- Negatives. --- 801.56 --- Syntaxis. Semantiek --- 801.56 Syntaxis. Semantiek --- Negation (Logic). --- Negative propositions --- Judgment (Logic) --- Negatives (Grammar) --- Negatives --- Linguistics --- Philology --- Grammar, Comparative and general - Negatives --- Cognitive Linguistics. --- Negation. --- Psycholinguistics. --- Semantics.

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This study in cross-linguistic semantics explores the territory where logic, natural language and typology meet. While we can all understand the semantics of negation in its role of altering truth values, this ambitious book aims to take the reader much further. A unified analysis of the linguistic ‘behavior’ of negation is hampered by the myriad variations in its syntax and semantics in languages around the world. This is true not just for the expression of negatives, but for their interpretation too. De Swart deploys the framework of bi-directional Optimality Theory to develop a typology of the relationship between syntax and semantics in negation markers and negative indefinites. In this model, syntactic and semantic constraints act in concert to define the grammar of a language. Some languages are ‘double negative’, some ‘negative concord’, and others belong to subclasses identified by ‘strict negative concord’ ‘nonstrict negative concord’ or ‘negative spread’. In addition to the above, the author analyses intermediate cases, and examines complex instances of double negation occurring in negative concord languages. Her OT analysis of the Jespersen cycle brings together typological and diachronic variation. This book’s unique combination of theoretical precision and wide empirical coverage make it essential reading for any researcher approaching semantic typology from a logical, linguistic or cognitive perspective.

Lexicology. Semantics --- Grammar --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Negation. --- Optimalitätstheorie. --- Semantics. --- Negatives. --- Negatives (Grammar) --- Formal semantics --- Semasiology --- Semiology (Semantics) --- Comparative linguistics --- Information theory --- Language and languages --- Lexicology --- Meaning (Psychology) --- Linguistics --- Philology