A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

150 Chapter 8 Negation and related phenomena

crucial point is that it can occur in the negative clause [ii] but is impossible in the
positive [i].

(b) The connective adjuncts so and neither or nor

When we add a related clause of the same polarity, the positive pair may be linked
by so, the negative pair by neither or nor:

[3] POSITIVE CLAUSE:

ii NEGATIVE CLAUSE:

1 have read your book, and so have my students.

1 haven't read your book, and neither have my students.

Switching the connectives leads to ungrammaticality: 1 have read your book and
neither have my students; 1 haven't read your book and so have my students.

(c) Confirmatory tags

A common device for seeking confirmation of what one says is to add a truncated
interrogative clause known as a tag. It generally consists of just an auxiliary verb +
personal pronoun subject, and its polarity is the reverse of that of the clause to which
it is attached:

[4] POSITIVE CLAUSE + NEGATIVE TAG:

11 NEGATIVE CLAUSE + POSITIVE TAG:

They have read my book, haven't they?

They haven't read my book, have they?

In [a] the negative tag (haven't they?) attaches to the positive clause, while in [b] the
positive tag (have they?) attaches to the negative clause.
These reversed polarity tags have to be distinguished from those with constant
polarity. These don't ask for confirmation, but suggest an attitude such as surprise,
disbelief, disapproval or the like: an author might say So they 've read my book, have
they? Amazing! For many speakers constant polarity tags aren't used with negative
clauses: % So they haven't read my book, haven't they? will be rejected by many
speakers of Standard English. For those speakers, if a negative tag is acceptable on
a clause, the clause must be positive.

(^2) Subclausal negation
We have seen that the effect of a negative element is very often to make
the clause containing it negative. Negative elements don't always have this effect,
however. In the cases where they don't, the negation is subclausal.

Affixal negation

The most obvious case where negative elements don't make a clause negative is
where the negative element is an affix other than the n't that appears on auxiliary
verbs. Take negative prefixes as in dislike, inattentive, non-negotiable, or unwilling,
or suffixes such as ·less in homeless. We can use the constructions shown in [2-4] to
show that these affixes don't make the whole clause negative. Compare, for exam­
ple, He was unkind, which contains the prefix un·, with He wasn't kind, which