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Negative polarity can be indicated by negating words or particles such as the English not, or the Japanese affix-nai, or by other means, which reverses the meaning of the predicate. The process of converting affirmative to negative is called negation – the grammatical rules for negation vary from language to language, and a given language may ...
Negative inversion is a phenomenon of English syntax. Other Germanic languages have a more general V2 word order, which allows inversion to occur much more often than in English, so they may not acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon. While negative inversion is a common occurrence in English, a solid understanding of just what ...
A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You're attractive").
A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is a licensing context . In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI.
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.
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]
Like Early Modern English, the Romanian language has a four-form system. The affirmative and negative responses to positively phrased questions are da and nu, respectively. But in responses to negatively phrased questions they are prefixed with ba (i.e. ba da and ba nu). nu is also used as a negation adverb, infixed between subject and verb ...
Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation . The negative predicate counts as a semantic function and is localized and therefore grammaticalized in different languages.