Characteristic features of expressing negation in English language

Many of them function as generalized quantifiers which prohibit either downward or upward entailment. As Jespersen traces the origin of Negative Polarity Items back to the strengthening of negation, non-monotonic contexts also favor strengthening by these words. [1]

Certain lexical items have been known to appear only in negative contexts. These, having been called negative polarity items, are such as any, anything, anymore, ever, at all, whatsoever, budge an inch, care to VP, and bother V-ing.

 Not:

a. I didn't realize that he admired her at all. [3]

 None:

a. None of the rivals said anything whatsoever.

The distribution of Negative Polarity Items is not limited to explicit negatives. Various contexts accommodate Negative Polarity Items.

At most:

a. At most three women have ever loved him.

b. At least three women have ever loved him.

Every:

a. Every student who had ever read anything about phrenology attended the lecture.

Only:

a. Only Bill had ever read anything about phrenology.

b. Even Bill had ever read anything about phrenology.

A number of scholars have attempted to capture the common feature of Negative Polarity Items licensers from semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, syntactic-pragmatic, and semantic-pragmatic viewpoints. [11]

Downward-Entailingness, proposed by Ladusaw, is valid in characterizing numerous Negative Polarity Items licensers. It, however, is not exempt from counterexamples. [13]       

A negative-polarity item is acceptable only if it is interpreted in the scope l of a downward-entailing expression.

A monotone decreasing scope corresponds to polarity sensitivity:

Every:

a. Every man walks. - Every father walks.

b. Every man walks. - Every man walks slowly.

c. Every student who had ever read anything on phrenology attended the lecture.

d. Every student who attended the lecture had ever read anything about phrenology.

The problem of Downward-Entailingness analysis lies in that it fails to predict the Negative Polarity Items licensing in the scope of only, exactly n and superlatives, which are neither monotone decreasing nor increasing. [13]

Only:

a. Only people who know a language will be admitted to the lecture. - Only people who know a Romance language will be admitted to the lecture.

b. Only people who have ever been to Paris will be admitted to the lecture.

       Superlatives:

a. John is the greatest man who ever lived.

b. John is the greatest man who ever lived in Japan.

Few, seldom and hardly are not non-veridical elements. Few and hardly even introduce veridical contexts. Before can be veridical, non-veridical or even antiveridical, depending on the context.

 Few/hardly any people came.

Giannakidou accounts for the fact that these semi-negatives license Polarity Items by arguing that Polarity Items can also be licensed indirectly. The difference between direct and indirect licensing is defined as follows. [11]

a. A Polarity Item is licensed directly in a sentence if a sentence provides some expression which is non-veridical, and a Polarity Item is the scope of expression.

b. A Polarity Item is licensed indirectly in a sentence if a sentence gives rise to a negative implicature and a Polarity Item is under the scope of the negation at a sentence’.

Now it is possible to account for the negativity of elements like few and seldom, since these elements give rise to negative implicatures. This makes it even possible to link non-veridical determiners like no to anti-veridical operators

a. Few people came - Not many people came.

b. No man came - It is not the case that any man came.

Now, we can define a negative context as follows: either as a context that is

introduced by an anti-veridical operator or a context that gives rise to a negative

implicature that contains a negation:

A negative context is introduced in sentence

a. a sentence contains an anti-veridical operator that introduces context; or

b. a sentence contains an operator due to which a sentence gives rise to a negative implicature of the sentence;

However, this definition still suffers from circularity with respect to the second clause because the definition of negative implicature is still defined in terms of negativity.

But just as anti-veridicality is the proper definition for negative elements, such as negative markers, negative quantifiers and n-words, is it the property of the negative element in the implicature that is raised after the introduction of a semi-negative in a sentence.

A negative context is introduced in sentence:

a. a sentence contains an anti-veridical operator that introduces context; or

b. a sentence contains an operator that enables a sentence to give rise to an implicature of the sentence that contains an anti-veridical operator’.

We saw before that downward entailment is not an incorrect notion for negative contexts, but rather a notion that overgeneralises. Therefore I showed that the notions of a-veridicality and indirect licensing yield the correct restriction on downward entailment. Hence the notion of negative elements (including n-words) can now be defined as follows:

A negative element is an element that under well-defined conditions introduces a negative context.

A negative element is thus equivalent to the operator: it is either an anti-veridical operator or it enables the sentence that it is in to give rise to an implicature containing an anti-veridical operator.

An n-word is an indefinite or quantifying element that only under certain well defined conditions introduces a negative context. [14]   

The exact conditions under which n-words do or do not introduce a negative context will be one of the central topics in this study. For the proper definition of n-words, to distinguish them from Negative Quantifiers, it suffices to say that there are specific conditions under which n-words do not introduce a negative context whereas Negative Quantifiers always introduce a negative context.

Now we have a formal notion of negative contexts and negative elements that serves as a working definition.

 

 

  1.1.4 Negative adjectives: contradictory and contrary Negation

 

Another class of negative elements is formed by prefixes that generally form negative adjectives, like English un-. Adjectives modify nouns, and using an adjective is one way of clarifying or specifying exactly what is meant. For example, a student who is trying to advise a classmate to take a required course with a specific instructor might tell the friend to enroll in the class taught by the bearded professor. If every professor in the department has a beard, however, it’s more efficient to use a negative adjective in a description, or a professor who is lacking a beard. A negative adjective simply offers the opposite position as a positive adjective and can be formed in a number of ways.

The most verbally efficient way to form a negative adjective is by locating an antonym for the positive position. In the above example, that would mean the student would send the friend in search of a beardless professor. A great many, although by no means all, English adjectives have antonyms; for example, short is the opposite of tall, thin of fat, rude of polite, and so on. A great many adjectival antonyms, or negative adjectives, are obvious and are learned at the earlier stages of language acquisition. In other cases, the differences can be more subtle; for example, delicate is a negative adjective to both healthy and stout.

Other negative adjectives can be formed almost as efficiently by simply preceding the adjective with a prefix. In English, dis, un, and mis, all mean opposite, along with anti and im. Thus, someone who is disinclined to agree is someone who doesn’t agree, and if you are unhappy, you have had better days. Misinformed means to have the wrong information, and imperfect is simply a way of saying not perfect. An anti-inflammatory medication is taken to work against inflammation. [15]      

A negative adjective can also be created by inserting the word not before the adjective. This can be done if no antonym is available or, more often, for emphasis. A mother who finds her children have created a mess might inform them that she is not happy because it has more emotional weight that the nearly identical phrase, unhappy. A job applicant who feels certain a job will be offered is likely to tell friends that he or she is not worried because none of the antonyms, which include fearless, intrepid, or undaunted, sound right.

Yet another way to form a negative adjective is by using comparative language. More, most, less, and least temper the adjective’s original meaning. An attentive boyfriend who is beginning to lose interest becomes less attentive, while one who is determined to win his sweetheart becomes more attentive.

Before discussing these examples in detail, we should first have a look at some formal properties of negation.

Two laws govern negation in Aristotelian logic: the Law of Contradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle. The first law demands that two opposite propositions cannot be true simultaneously; the Law of the Excluded Middle requires that of any two opposite propositions, one is true.

a. Law of Contradiction

b. Law of the Excluded Middle

Standard negation, as we saw in the previous cases, obeys both laws:

a. John is older than 18

b. John is not older than 18

Whatever John’s age may be, it follows immediately that these sentences cannot be true simultaneously and that one of the sentences is true so both laws apply.

However, not every instance of negation obeys both laws:

a. John is friendly

b. John is unfriendly

The Law of Contradiction still holds: the two sentences cannot be true simultaneously in the same situation. The Law of the Excluded Middle however does not hold: it is very well possible that John is neither friendly nor unfriendly. Horn (1989) analyzes these predicates as so-called scalar predicates, which denote a scale from very unfriendly to very friendly. Unfriendly then denotes a particular part of this scale, just like friendly. However, the two do not meet.

Apparently, Aristotelian logic contains two different kinds of negation: Contradictory Negation and Contrary Negation.

a. Contradictory Negation: obeys Law of Contradiction and Law of the Excluded Middle

b. Contrary Negation: only obeys Law of Contradiction

As the definitions hold for both kinds of negation, it is predicted that negative adjectives can also license Negative Polarity Items in their licensing domain. This prediction is born out.

Unaware of any dangers, he went on vacation.

 

 

    1.2 The semantics of the affixes and their comparative analysis of affix negative morpheme semantic.

 

The first step in our studying English negative affixes is to give a definition of the affix itself. Here is a definition given in Oxford Advanced Lerner’s Dictionary of Current English. Affix is a letter or group of letters added to the beginning or end of a word to change its meaning [16]. This definition takes into account only prefixes and suffixes. But it does not cover all the kinds of affixes. It is important to keep in mind that there are also different types of affixes present in the English language as well:

-circumfix (one portion appears at the front of a stem, and the other at the rear, like in ascattered),

-simulfix (changes a segment of a stem, like in mouse-mice),

-suprafix (changes a suprasegmental phoneme of a stem, for example, the change of an like in produce (noun)-produce (verb));

-duflifix (incorporates a reduplicated portion of a stem (may occur in front, at the rear, or within the stem), like in teeny-weeny) [17].

So we see that the definition should be wider. So, if we also take into account that the morphemes are generally divided into root- and affixal morphemes, the definition will be the following: affifx is a morpheme that is attached to the stem to form a new word with another meaning.

It was written much about semantics of an affix. There are heated debates in the linguistic literature, whether the affix has meaning in general, and if yes, what type of meaning. There are different points of view, frequently opposite, which, however, can be reduced to several basic directions:

1) The affix has no independent meaning; it only forms the external side of a word;

2) The affix carries out basically only transporting function, translating a basis from one lexical and grammatical class in another, and lexically "is empty";

3) The affix can be characterized by presence of a various sort of meanings: one affixes express a wide and various circle of lexical meanings, others - only grammatic meanings [18].

It is also important to notice that “affixes specify, or transform the meaning of the root. Affixal specification may be of two kinds: of lexical or grammatical character. So, according to the semantic criterion affixes are further subdivided into lexical, or word-building (derivational) affixes, which together with the root constitute the stem of the word, and grammatical, or word-changing affixes, expressing different morphological categories, such as number, case, tense and others. With the help of lexical affixes new words are derived, or built; with the help of grammatical affixes the form of the word is changed” [19]. One of our further aims will be to study whether English negative affixes are lexical or grammatical or they can be of both types.

On this stage of the analyses rises the question of the criterion for referring affixes to negative and what affixes can be called negative. For the answer it is better to look up the word ”negative” in the dictionary first. So, the Longman dictionary gives the following definition:

negative: 1) a refusing, doubting, or disapproving; saying or meaning ‘no’,

b containing one of the words ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘nothing, ‘never’ etc.

2) without any active, useful or helping qualities; not constructive

3) showing the lack of what was hoped for or expected [20].

From the present definition we see that the first meaning of these words is better applicable to affixes, and this meaning should be the criteria for figuring out negative affixes.

Our next task is to see, which affixes are considered to be negative. According to the previous statement they are the following: a-, ant(i)-, dis-, dys-, in-, mal-, mis-, nega-, non-, un- [17]. From this list we can see, that they are all prefixes. So arises the question, is the negative function in English world-building performed only by prefixes. If we consult other sources we see that there is one suffix changing the meaning of the word to the opposite: -less (motion-motionless) [18]. And we also add it to this list. As for the prefixes, de- can also carry the idea of oppositeness, and il-, im- and ir- must be added too, as they are the allomorphs of in-. So let us see what their meanings are.

So if we consult Longman Dictionary of English Language and culture, the result will be the following.

a-: (showing an opposite or absence of something) not; without: amoral (=not moral)

anti-: 1 apposed to; against: antinuclear (apposing the use of atomic weapons and power) 2 opposite of: an anticlimax (=an unexciting ending of the expected climax)

contra-: opposite (plants is contradiction to animals)

de-: (in verbs and nouns) (showing an opposite): a depopulated area (which all or most of the population has left)

dis-: (showing an opposite or negative): I disapprove (=do not approve)

il-: illogical (=not logical)

im-: immobilize

in-: (especially in adjectives and nouns) (showing a negative, an apposite, or a lack) not: insensible

ir-: not: irregular (=not regular)

mal-: bad or badly: a malformed (=wrongly shaped) limb

mis-: 1 bad or badly: misfortune;

2 wrong or wrongly: a miscalculation

3 (showing an opposite or the lack of something): I mistrust (=do not trust) him

non-: (especially in adjectives and nouns) (showing a negative) not: a non-smoker (=someone who does not smokes)

un-: 1 (especially in adjectives and adverbs) showing a negative, a lack, or an opposite) not: unfair; 2 (especially in verbs) (showing an opposite): undress (take one’s clothes off)

less (in adjectives): 1 without a ---: a childless couple (= who have no children); 2 that never ---s or can not be ---ed: helpless (= can not be helped). [20]

For the prefixes il-, im-, ir- there are no definitions in the dictionary, as they all refer to the suffix in-. The aspect of their difference is explained by allo-morphemic theory.

When studying morphemes, we should distinguish morphemes as generalized lingual units from their concrete manifestations, or variants in specific textual environments; variants of morphemes are called “allo-morphs”. The allo-morphemic theory distinguishes morphemes according to their concrete realization. In the study of morphemes it was developed in Descriptive Linguistic by means of distributional analysis. There are three types of distribution then: contrastive distribution, non-contrastive distribution and complementary distribution. Contrastive distribution means that morphs express different meanings in identical environments, e.g.: He started laughing – He starts laughing. The morphs are said to be in non-contrastive distribution if they express identical meaning in identical environments; such morphs constitute ‘free variants’ of the same morpheme, e.g.: learned – learnt. The morphs are in complementary distribution when they express identical meanings in different environments, e.g.: He started laughing – He stopped laughing; such morphs constitute variants, or allo-morphs of the same morpheme [14].

Allo-morphemic theory plays an important role in the descriptive analysis of negative affixes. One of the most active negative affixes is in-. Its allomorphs are il-, im-, ir-. That means that they carry on the same meaning, but they are attached to different stems. It can be a great problem for English learners, therefore it is important to clarify the rules of allo-morphemic affixes. The in- changes or is assimilated to il- if the stem begins with l, as in illuminate; to im- before b, as in imbibe, before m, as in immediate, before p, as with implant; and to ir- before r, as in irrigate. So the distribution of the allo-morphs concerned is complementary.

It is quite reasonable to give the examples to these affixes and the definitions of these words given in the dictionary.

• atypical: not typical; different from what is usual: Her reaction to the drug was atypical.
• antiaircraft: directed against enemy aircraft: antiaircraft missiles
• contraindication: a physical sign or condition that makes it inadvisable to take or continue taking a medicine: High blood pressure is a contraindication for this drug.
• destabilize: to make less firm or steady, especially politically: a deliberate attempt to destabilize the economy of a rival country
• disclaim: to state that one does not have or accept; to deny: He disclaimed all responsibility for the accident.
• illiterate: who has nor learnt to read or write: (fig.) an illiterate note.
• immodest: showing or tending to express a high opinion of oneself and oneself’s abilities, perhaps higher than is really deserved; not modest: immodest behaviour.
• inaction: lack of action or activity; quality or state of doing nothing
• irrational: not using reason; against reasonable behaviour: After taking the drug she became quite irrational.
• miscount: to count wrongly: The teacher miscounted the number of boys.

nonresident: a person not living in a certain place: Are nonresidents entitled to vote?

• unannounced: having given no sign of being present; appear unexpectedly: He burst into doctor’s room quite unannounced and started shouting at her.

countless: very many; too many to be counted: countless reasons against it. [20]

Since we have even more examples of words with the negative affixes, it is more possible to apply the definitions of the affixes to the definitions of the words with these affixes. It is becoming clear then that the meanings of the affixes given in the dictionary are quite general. It was stated above, that affix has no independent meaning, so only when attached to words, affixes acquire a more specific meaning in each case. The reason for it is that affix is not an independent unit; therefore its meaning taken separately can be stated only generally.