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An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. taberu ("eat") and tabenai ("do not eat"). It could be argued that English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinct syntax in most cases; the form of the ...
nǐ you 去 qù go 不 bù not 去 ? qù go 你 去 不 去 ? nǐ qù bù qù you go not go Are you going? AB-not-AB form Example (4) illustrates the AB-not-AB pattern, where AB is the constituent consisting of the verb rende, 'know', as A, and the complement zhe ge ren, 'this CL man', as B, combining to form the AB constituent rende zhe ge ren 'know this CL man'. This produces rende zhe ...
A similar development to a circumfix from double negation can be seen in non-Indo-European languages, too: for example, in Maltese, kiel "he ate" is negated as ma kielx "he did not eat", where the verb is preceded by a negative particle ma - "not" and followed by the particle -x, which was originally a shortened form of xejn "nothing" - thus ...
In a three-form system, the affirmative response to a positively phrased question is the unmarked affirmative, the affirmative response to a negatively phrased question is the marked affirmative, and the negative response to both forms of question is the (single) negative. For example, in Norwegian the affirmative answer to "Snakker du norsk?"
Do-support (sometimes referred to as do-insertion or periphrastic do), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb do (or one of its inflected forms e.g. does), to form negated clauses and constructions which require subject–auxiliary inversion, such as questions.
English tag questions, when they have the grammatical form of a question, are atypically complex, because they vary according to at least three factors: the choice of auxiliary, the negation and the intonation pattern. This is unique among the Germanic languages, but the Celtic languages operate in a very similar way.
Some languages have different particles (for example the French "si", the German "doch" or the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian "jo") to answer negative questions (or negative statements) in an affirmative way; they provide a means to express contradiction.
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]