A Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali)

9.5 External negation and negative copular clauses 585

(631) miAtaet 1-lae-n

who?-\3FeSgO 3MaSgS-have.PerfP-PartplMaSg

'Who has it-Fe?' (= 'Whose is it-Fe?')

The T-ka speaker was checked for whether Past preverbal particle kaela

(§8.4.6.3) can be used with e.g.l-nin 'it is mine'. The answer was negative:

#kaelal-nin was ungrammatical. Instead, kasld can combine with -νΐυ- 'have'

(632).

(632) kaelaAtt ole-r

Past-\3MaSgO have.PerfP-1 SgS

Ί used to have it.' (= 'It used to be mine.')

Likewise, predicate genitive forms like "i-nin 'it is mine' cannot be

directly negated by the usual preverbal Neg particle WEer. Instead, a biclausal

(external) negative construction is used; see §9.5. Yet another construction is

used as a the focalized counterpart of predicate genitives; see (753.a) in

§12.2.6. Clearly, the predicate genitive type vi-nin has none of the

morphosyntactic attributes of a true verb.

9.5 External negation and negative copular clauses

In addition to the normal clause-intemal negation, expressed with waer as a

preverbal particle (§9.6.2), there is an external negative element (arguably

segmentable) with the dialectal variants indicated in (633).

(633) External Negation (Dialectal Variants)

form dialect(s)

wasdden A-grm K-d R T-ka T-md

waedder T-ka

waerjen Κ

waergen A-grm

The variants that are arguably segmentable are the last two, which can be

taken as Neg waer plus 3MaPl PerfN je-n (A-grm variant -ge-n), hence 'they

were not done'. However, the ...ΘΥ of the second variant looks like a lSg

ending. In any event, the dialectally predominant form waedden, and its variant

waedder, are not cleanly segmentable in this way, since there is no suitable

verb stem -vdi>. A similar variation in ending is seen in sasdder 'not yet',

variant saedden (§11.3.5). However, saedden is a rare variant limited to certain

eastern dialects, while waedden and its variants are widespread.