Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative
and negative, which indicates the truth or falsehood of
a statement respectively. In English,
grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence
or absence of the modifier not, which negates the
statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers:
Italian
and Interlingua
have non, Spanish
has no, French
has ne ... pas, and German
has nicht.
Negative
In many languages, rather than inflecting the verb, negation
is expressed by adding a particle:
- Before the verb phrase, as in Spanish
No está en casa;
- Or after it, as in archaic and dialectal English
you remember not or Dutch
Ik zie hem niet;
- Or both, as in French
Je ne sais pas or Afrikaans
Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie.
Standard English usually adds the auxiliary
verb do, and then adds not after it:
"I did not go there". In these instances, "do"
is known as a dummy
auxiliary, because of its zero semantic content.
In Indo-European
languages, it is not customary to speak of a negative
mood, since in the languages negation is originally a
grammatical
particle that can be applied to a verb in any of these
moods. Nevertheless, in some, like Welsh,
verbs have special inflections to be used in negative
clauses.
In other language families, the negative may count as
a separate mood. An example is Japanese,
which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the
suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. tabeta
("ate") and tabenakatta ("did not eat").
It could be argued that Modern
English has joined the ranks of these languages, since
negation in the indicative mood requires the use of an
auxiliary
verb and a distinct syntax
in most cases. Zwicky
and Pullum
have shown that n't is an inflectional suffix,
not a clitic
or a derivational suffix[1].
Contrast, for instance, "He sings" → "He
doesn't sing" (where the dummy auxiliary do
has to be supplied and inflected to doesn't) with
Il chante → Il ne chante pas;
French
adds the (discontinuous) negative particle ne ... pas,
without changing the form of the verb.
See also
References
- ^
Zwicky,
Arnold M. & Pullum,
Geoffrey K. (1983), "Cliticization
vs. Inflection: English n't", Language
59(3): 502-513, <http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/ZPCliticsInfl.pdf>
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_polarity
