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  2. Affirmation and negation - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmation_and_negation

    The affirmative, in an English example such as "the police chief here is a woman", declares a simple fact, in this case, it is a fact regarding the police chief and asserts that she is a woman. [5] In contrast, the negative, in an English example such as "the police chief here is not a man", is stated as an assumption for people to believe. [5]

  3. Negative capability - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability

    "Negative capability" is the capacity of artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term, first used by John Keats in 1817, has been subsequently used by poets, philosophers and literary theorists to describe the ability to ...

  4. Double negative - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative

    Because standard English does not have negative concord but many varieties and registers of English do, and because most English speakers can speak or comprehend across varieties and registers, double negatives as collocations are functionally auto-antonymic (contranymic) in English; for example, a collocation such as "ain't nothin" or "not ...

  5. Negative inversion - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_inversion

    In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject–auxiliary inversion in English.A negation (e.g. not, no, never, nothing, etc.) or a word that implies negation (only, hardly, scarcely) or a phrase containing one of these words precedes the finite auxiliary verb necessitating that the subject and finite verb undergo inversion. [1]

  6. Pleonasm - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm

    There are examples of the pleonastic, or dummy, negative in English, such as the construction, heard in the New England region of the United States, in which the phrase "So don't I" is intended to have the same positive meaning as "So do I." [11] [12]

  7. Polarity item - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_item

    For example, anywhere is an NPI corresponding to the negative nowhere, as used in the following sentences: I was going nowhere. (the negative nowhere is used when not preceded by another negative) I was not going anywhere. (the NPI anywhere is used in the environment of the preceding negative not)

  8. Litotes - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes

    In rhetoric, litotes (/ l aɪ ˈ t oʊ t iː z, ˈ l aɪ t ə t iː z /, US: / ˈ l ɪ t ə t iː z /), [1] also known classically as antenantiosis or moderatour, is a figure of speech and form of irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.

  9. Negative raising - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising

    In linguistics, negative raising is a phenomenon that concerns the raising of negation from the embedded or subordinate clause of certain predicates to the matrix or main clause. [1] The higher copy of the negation, in the matrix clause, is pronounced; but the semantic meaning is interpreted as though it were present in the embedded clause. [2]