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An affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity or truth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. For example, the affirmative sentence "Joe is here" asserts that it is true that Joe is currently located near the speaker. Conversely, the negative sentence "Joe is not here" asserts that it is not true ...
Positive in linguistic terms refers to the degree of the quality of an adjective or adverb, while affirmative refers to the perceived validity of the entire sentence. Thus, all three terms being separate entities, an adjective or adverb can be in the positive degree but expressed in the negative, so that the sentence, This hummer does not seem ...
The actual set of contexts that license particular polarity items is not as easily defined as a simple distinction between affirmative and negative sentences. Baker [2] noted that double negation may provide an acceptable context for positive polarity items: I can't believe you don't fancy her somewhat. John doesn't have any potatoes
When two negatives are used in one independent clause, in standard English the negatives are understood to cancel one another and produce a weakened affirmative (see the Robert Lowth citation below): this is known as litotes. However, depending on how such a sentence is constructed, in some dialects if a verb or adverb is in between two ...
Yes and no, or similar word pairs, are expressions of the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages, including English. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems.
The following is a partial list of linguistic example sentences illustrating various linguistic phenomena. Ambiguity
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis).
Some languages form the negative of existential clauses irregularly; for example, in Russian, есть yest ("there is/are") is used in affirmative existential clauses (in the present tense), but the negative equivalent is нет nyet ("there is/are not"), used with the logical subject in the genitive case.