This book provides a detailed exploration of negation and negative polarity phenomena and their implications for linguistic theory. Including new, specially commissioned work from some of the leading European, American, and Japanese scholars, Negation and Polarity covers all of the main approaches to this subject--syntactic, pragmatic, semantic, and cognitive--in a variety of language contexts.

Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and typological factors in negative expression.

This book addresses three fundamental questions in the study of negation: What are the main ways of expressing sentential negation? What are the distributional properties of lexically-encoded negative elements? And, what implications do the answers to these two questions have for the theory of grammar? In answering these questions, Jong-Bok Kim investigates various aspects of negation in Korean, English, French and Italian. Addressing both empirical and theoretical issues relating to negation in these languages, he develops a nonderivational, lexicalist analysis within the constraint-based framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

This book contains eleven carefully selected papers, all discussing negative constructions in English. The aim of this volume is to bring together empirical research into the development of English negation and analyses of syntactic variations in Present-day English negation. The first part "Aspects of Negation in the History of English" includes six contributions, which focus on the usages of the negative adverbs ne and not, the decline of negative concord, and the development of the auxiliary do in negation.

Contains 12 papers on negation in the history of English, most of them dealing with multiple negation or the mobility of the negative element. The contributions represent different theoretical and methodological approaches. Other papers seek functional explanations of the investigated problems.