Inlinguistics andgrammar,affirmation (abbreviatedAFF) andnegation (NEG) are ways in which grammar encodes positive and negativepolarity intoverb phrases,clauses, orutterances. An affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity ortruth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. For example, the affirmativesentence "Joe is here" asserts that it is true that Joe is currently located near the speaker. Conversely, the negative sentence "Joe is not here" asserts that it is not true that Joe is currently located near the speaker.
Thegrammatical category associated with affirmatives and negatives is calledpolarity. This means that a clause, sentence, verb phrase, etc. may be said to have either affirmative or negative polarity (its polarity may be either affirmative or negative). Affirmative is typically the unmarked polarity, whereas a negative statement is marked in some way. Negative polarity can be indicated by negating words orparticles such as theEnglishnot, or theJapaneseaffix -nai, or by other means, which reverses the meaning of thepredicate. The process of converting affirmative to negative is callednegation – the grammatical rules for negation vary from language to language, and a given language may have multiple methods of negation.
Affirmative and negative responses (specifically, though not exclusively, to questions) are often expressed using particles or words such asyes andno, whereyes is the affirmative, or positive particle, andno is the negation, or negative particle.
Affirmation and negation are a crucial building blocks for language. The presence of negation is the absence of affirmation, where affirmation functions individually.[1] There are three main aspects to the concept of affirmation and negation;Cognitive,psychological andphilosophical (Schopenhauers theory orNietzschean affirmation).
Negation in English is more difficult for the brain to process as it works in opposition to affirmation.[1] If affirmation and negation were missing from language people would only be able to communicate through possibilities.[2] The recent Reusing Inhibition for Negation (RIN) hypothesis states that there is a specific inhibitory control mechanism (one that is reused) that is needed when trying to understand negation in sentences.[3]
Affirmations orpositive polarity items (PPIs) are expressions that are rejected by negation, usually escaping the scope of negation.[4] PPIs in the literature have been associated with speaker orientedadverbs, as well as expressions similar tosome,already, andwould rather.[4] Affirmative sentences work in opposition to negations. The affirmative, in an English example such as "the police chief here is a woman", declares a simple fact, in this case, it is a fact regarding the police chief and asserts that she is a woman.[5] In contrast, the negative, in an English example such as "the police chief here is not a man", is stated as an assumption for people to believe.[5] It is also widely believed that the affirmative is theunmarked base form from which the negative is produced, but this can be argued when coming from apragmatic standpoint.[5] Pragmatically, affirmatives can sometimes derive the pragmatically unmarked form, or, at times, create novel affirmativederivatives.[5]
Affirmation can also be compared to the notion of assertiveness.
Affirmation can be indicated with the following words in English:some,certainly,already, andwould rather.[4] Two examples of affirmation include (1) John is here already[4] and (2) I am a moral person.[5] These two sentences are truth statements, and serve as a representation of affirmation in English. The negated versions can be formed as the statements (1NEG) John is not here already and (2NEG) I am not a moral person.
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InDagaare, there are verbalsuffixes, such as-ng, that serve as an affirmation or an emphasis to a verbal action.[6] These verbal suffixes are also known as afocusparticle or afactitive marker.
There are also cases of the identifyingpronounna developing into an affirmative marker.na is reanalyzed into a clause final particle simultaneously with the denominalisation of the clausal subject which brings the result ofna as a clausenominalising particle which can again be reanalyzed as a positive, future, marker.[7] This clause final particle is known to only be used to mark assertiveness in positive clauses because it is not seen co-occurring with negative markers.[7]
Simple grammatical negation of a clause, in principle, has the effect of converting a proposition to itslogical negation. This is done by replacing an assertion that something is the case with an assertion that it is not the case.
In some cases, however, particularly when a particularmodality is expressed, thesemantic effect of negation may be somewhat different. For example, in English, the meaning of "you must not go" is not the exact negation of "you must go". The exact negation of this phrase would be expressed as "you don't have to go" or "you needn't go". The negation "must not" has a stronger meaning (the effect is to apply the logical negation to the following infinitive rather than applying it to the full clause withmust). For more details and other similar cases, see the relevant sections ofEnglish modal verbs.
Negation flipsdownward entailing and upward entailing statements within the scope of the negation. For example, changing "one could have seen anything" to "no one could have seen anything" changes the meaning of the last word from "anything" to "nothing".
In some cases, by way ofirony, an affirmative statement may be intended to have the meaning of the corresponding negative, or vice versa. For examples seeantiphrasis andsarcasm.
For the use of double negations or similar as understatements ("not unappealing", "not bad", etc.) seelitotes.
Languages have a variety of grammatical rules for converting affirmative verb phrases or clauses into negative ones.
In many languages, an affirmative is made negative by the addition of aparticle, meaning "not". This may be added before the verb phrase, as with theSpanishno:
Other examples of negating particles preceding the verb phrase includeItaliannon,Russian неnye andPolishnie (they can also be found inconstructed languages:ne inEsperanto andnon inInterlingua). In some other languages the negating particle follows the verb or verb phrase, as inDutch:
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Particles following the verb in this way includenot in archaic and dialectal English ("you remember not"),nicht inGerman (ich schlafe nicht, "I am not sleeping"), andinte inSwedish (han hoppade inte, "he did not jump").
InFrench, particles are added both before the verb phrase (ne) and after the verb (pas):
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However, in colloquial French the first particle is often omitted:Je sais pas. Similar use of two negating particles can also be found inAfrikaans:Hy kannie Afrikaans praatnie ("He cannot speak Afrikaans").
In English, negation is achieved by addingnot after the verb. As a practical matter,Modern English typically uses a copula verb (a form ofbe) or anauxiliary verb withnot. If no other auxiliary verb is present, thendummy auxiliarydo (does,did) is normally introduced – seedo-support. For example,
but that wording is considered archaic and is rarely used. It is much more common to use the dummy auxiliary to render
Different rules apply insubjunctive,imperative andnon-finite clauses. For more details seeEnglish grammar § Negation. (InMiddle English, the particlenot could follow any verb, e.g. "I see not the horse.")
In some languages, likeWelsh, verbs have special inflections to be used in negative clauses. (In some language families, this may lead to reference to a negativemood.) An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix-nai (indicating negation), e.g.taberu ("eat") andtabenai ("do not eat"). It could be argued that English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinctsyntax in most cases; the form of the basic verb can change on negation, as in "hesings" vs. "he doesn'tsing".Zwicky andPullum have shown thatn't is aninflectional suffix, not aclitic or a derivational suffix.[8]
Complex rules for negation also apply inFinnish; seeFinnish grammar § Negation of verbs. In some languages negation may also affect the dependents of the verb; for example in someSlavic languages, such asPolish, thecase of adirect object often changes fromaccusative togenitive when the verb is negated.
Negation can be applied not just to whole verb phrases, clauses or sentences, but also to specific elements (such asadjectives andnoun phrases) within sentences.[a] This contrast is usually labeledsentential negation versusconstituent negation.[9] Ways in which this constituent negation is realized depends on the grammar of the language in question. English generally placesnot before the negated element, as in "I witnessednot a debate, but a war." There are also negating affixes, such as the Englishprefixesnon-,un-,in-, etc. Such elements are calledprivatives.
There also exist elements which carry a specialized negative meaning, including pronouns such asnobody,none andnothing,determiners such asno (as in "no apples"), and adverbs such asnever,no longer andnowhere.
Although such elements themselves have negative force, in some languages a clause in which they appear is additionally marked for ordinary negation. For example, inRussian, "I see nobody" is expressed as я никого́ не ви́жуja nikovó nye vízhu, literally "I nobody not see" – the ordinary negating particle неnye ("not") is used in addition to the negative pronoun никого́nikovó ("nobody"). Italian behaves in a similar way:Non ti vede nessuno, "nobody can see you", althoughNessuno ti vede is also a possible clause with exactly the same meaning.
In Russian, all of the elements ("not", "never", "nobody", "nowhere") would appear together in the sentence in their negative form.
In Italian, a clause works much as in Russian, butnon does not have to be there, and can be there only before the verb if it precedes all other negative elements:Tu non porti mai nessuno da nessuna parte. "Nobody ever brings you anything here", however, could be translatedNessuno qui ti porta mai niente orQui non ti porta mai niente nessuno.
In French, where simple negation is performed usingne ... pas (see above), specialized negatives appear in combination with the first particle (ne), butpas is omitted:
InAncient Greek, a simple negative (οὐou "not" or μήmḗ "not (modal)") following another simple or compound negative (e.g. οὐδείςoudeís "nobody") results in an affirmation, whereas a compound negative following a simple or compound negative strengthens the negation:
In Dagaare, negation is marked specifically by pre-verb particles, where only four, out of the nearly 24 pre-verb particles, are designated as negation markers.[10] The four negation markers areba,kʊ̀ŋ,ta, andtɔ́ɔ́.[10] To signal negation, as well as other semantic relation, these negation particles combine with different aspects of the verb.[10] These pre-verb negatory particles can also be used to conveytense,mood,aspect, and polarity (negation), and in some cases can be used to convey more than one of these features.[10]
For example, the negation markerta can be used to indicate polarity and mood:
For example, the negation markerba can be used as a non-future, or present tense, negative marker:
Various signed and manual languages are known to negate via headshake.[11]
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Special affirmative and negative words (particles) are often found in responses to questions, and sometimes to other assertions by way of agreement or disagreement. In English, these areyes andno respectively, in Frenchoui,si andnon, in Danishja,jo andnej, in Spanishsí andno and so on. Not all languages make such common use of particles of this type; in some (such as Welsh) it is more common to repeat the verb or another part of the predicate, with or without negation accordingly.
Complications sometimes arise in the case of responses to negative statements or questions; in some cases the response that confirms a negative statement is the negative particle (as in English: "You're not going out? No."), but in some languages this is reversed. Some languages have a distinct form to answer a negative question, such as Frenchsi and Danishjo (these serve to contradict the negative statement suggested by the first speaker).