__ Negation and related phenomena
I Negative and positive clauses 149
2 Subclausal negation 150
3 Clausal negation 151
4 Non-affinnative items 154
5 Scope of negation 156
1 Negative and positive clauses
Negation is marked by individual words (such as not, no, never) or by
affixes within a word (such as ·n't, un·, non·). Very often, however, there is an effect
on the whole clause. In pairs like those in [1], for example, we have a contrast
between a positive clause and the corresponding negative clause:
[I] POSITIVE CLAUSE NEGATIVE CLAUSE
a. He has signed the agreement. b. He hasn't signed the agreement.The grammatical system in which positive and negative contrast is called polarity:
clause [a] has positive polarity, while [b] has negative polarity.
Semantically, a simple pair of positive and negative clauses like these are related
in such a way that they cannot both be true, but they also cannot both be false. One
of them has got to be true: either he has signed the agreement or he hasn't.
Syntactically, positive is the default polarity. All canonical clauses are positive.
Negative clauses are marked as such by the presence of a specific negative element,
like the negative verb-form hasn't in [I b]. And positive and negative clauses differ
in the way they combine with other expressions in the structure of larger units. Here
are the three major differences.
(a) Addition of not even
After a negative clause we can add a constituent introduced by not even, and it
makes sense. This is not possible with positive clauses:
[2] POSITIVE CLAUSE:
ii NEGATIVE CLAUSE:* I have read your book, not even the introduction.
I haven't read your book, not even the introduction.The addition in [ii] is interpreted as "I haven't even read the introduction". The
not isn't obligatory (cf. I haven 't read your book, even the introduction) but the
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