Typological Studies in Negation

Book excerpt: This collection of articles offers descriptions of the negation system in 16 languages. As not much is known about negation systems in non-European languages, the first aim of the volume is to provide data on various aspects on negation; for all articles these data were collected on the basis of the same questionnaire.Most work on this subject deals with syntactic aspects of negation; this volume attempts to include pragmatic and semantic issues as well, such as the expression of negative indefinites, interaction of negation and quantifiers, the scope of negation, and the choice of a particular form of negation in cases where there are several ways to express this.For a number of less-known languages descriptions offering a wealth of data are presented here, and in the articles about well-studied languages, new data and analyses of more complicated issues are provided.