Negation and Constituent Ordering: Case studies

Abstract

The addition of a marker of sentential negation to an affirmative sentence can give rise to effects in the morpho-syntactic make-up of the sentence. This chapter examines selected instances in languages where the constituent ordering of a sentence including a sentential negation marker differs from that of the corresponding non-negative sentence. For the data examined in this chapter, the greatest number of affirmative/negative ordering contrasts are observed when the negative is initial and especially when it has the characteristics of a verb. But disruptions to constituent ordering are found also when the negative is medial or final, and not just with negative verbs, but also when the nega..