Negation in clause linkages
- Oliver Bond
Abstract
The linguistic subfield of language documentation lends itself well to the study of language phenomena which are pragmatically-oriented ... One such pragmatically oriented phenomenon –linguistic negation– constitutes an area of grammatical analysis for which the availability of context dependent information will dramatically improve descriptive, theoretical and pedagogical treatments. The importance of contextualisation of negative utterances is clear from a number of studies that explicitly discuss the contextual setting for the use of negative constructions. Despite the enriched understanding of negation phenomena that follows from these studies, little has been done to date to draw together ideas on how negation might be analysed in a corpus of natural speech in an unfamiliar language.
However, a large body of evidence from languages across the world demonstrates that the form and use of negators is determined by their usage in several different types of discourse unit larger than a single clause or predicate, and, furthermore, such structures may have properties that are different from independent clauses. The object of this paper is to examine the variation seen in discourse units consisting of more than one clause in order to provide a backdrop for analysing negation data in a corpus of discourse data.
Keywords: language documentation, linguistic negation, grammatical analysis, contextualisation, negation data, discourse data
How to Cite:
Bond, O., (2011) “Negation in clause linkages”, Language Documentation and Description 9, 77-120. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd206
Downloads:
Download PDF