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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 have multiple methods of negation. Affirmative and negative responses (specifically, though not exclusively, to questions) are often expressed using particles or words such as yes ...
Languages where multiple negatives affirm each other are said to have negative concord or emphatic negation. [1] Lithuanian , Portuguese , Persian , French , Russian , Polish , Bulgarian , Greek , Spanish , Icelandic , Old English , Italian , Afrikaans , and Hebrew are examples of negative-concord languages.
In Spanish, the words sí 'yes' and no 'no' are unambiguously classified as adverbs: serving as answers to questions and also modifying verbs. The affirmative sí can replace the verb after a negation (Yo no tengo coche, pero él sí = I don't own a car, but he does) or intensify it (I don't believe he owns a car.
Spanish unmarked word order for affirmative declarative sentences is subject-verb-object (SVO); however, as in other Romance languages, in practice, word order is more variable, with topicalization and focus being the primary factors in the selection of a particular order.
In many languages, the question tag is a simple positive or negative. Russian allows да? (yes) whereas Spanish and Italian use ¿no? and no? respectively. In Indonesian, sometimes ya? (yes) is used but it is more common to say kan?, which probably is a contraction of bukan (negation for nouns).
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. However, there are many complications, and not all ...
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.
Spanish verbs are conjugated in three persons, each having a singular and a plural form. In some varieties of Spanish, such as that of the Río de la Plata Region, a special form of the second person is used. Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns are often omitted.