Grammatical polarity

Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative and negative, which indicates the truth or falsehood of a statement respectively. In English, grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence or absence of the modifier not, which negates the statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers: Italian and Interlingua have non, Spanish has no, French has ne ... pas, Esperanto has ne, German has nicht, and Swedish has inte. Special negative and affirmative items are often found in answers to questions. In English, these are no and yes respectively, in French non and oui. In addition to this, some languages have a distinct form for a positive answer to a negative question, such as French si.

Negative

In many languages, rather than inflecting the verb, negation is expressed by adding a particle:

• Before the verb phrase, as in Spanish "No está en casa";
• Or after it, as in archaic and dialectal English "you remember not" or Dutch "Ik zie hem niet" or Swedish "han hoppade inte;
• Or both, as in French "Je ne sais pas" or Afrikaans "Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie".

Standard English usually adds the auxiliary verb do, and then adds not after it: "I did not go there". In these instances, "do" is known as a dummy auxiliary, because of its zero semantic content.

In Indo-European languages, it is not customary to speak of a negative mood, since in the languages negation is originally a grammatical particle that can be applied to a verb in any of these moods. Nevertheless, in some, like Welsh, verbs have special inflections to be used in negative clauses.

In other language families, the negative may count as a separate mood. An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. tabeta ("ate") and tabenakatta ("did not eat"). It could be argued that Modern English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation in the indicative mood requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinct syntax in most cases. Zwicky and Pullum have shown that n't is an inflectional suffix, not a clitic or a derivational suffix^[1]. Contrast, for instance, "He sings" → "He doesn't sing" (where the dummy auxiliary do has to be supplied and inflected to doesn't) with Il chante → Il ne chante pas; French adds the (discontinuous) negative particle ne ... pas, without changing the form of the verb.

See also

• Affirmation
• Assertion
• Grammatical category
• Grammatical mood
• Negation (linguistics)
• Polarity item
• Sentence (linguistics)
• Statement

References