AN OVERVIEW OF STUDIES OF THE LINGUISTIC PHENOMENON OF NEGATION

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a brief overview of the past studies on negation, starting from Jespersen (1917) to the more recent ones that are elaborated within the generative grammar and based on Klima (1964). In the work of Klima (1964) and all subsequent works on the grammar of negation, such as Lasnik (1972), Pollock (1989), Laka (1990), Progovac (1994, 2005), Haegeman (1995) and Zanuttini (1997), attention has been confined to a formal means for expressing the meaning of sentence negation. Linguists have been trying to establish whether natural languages have a universal formal feature that corresponds to the meaning of negation. As a formal representation of negation they proposed the Neg symbol, the NegP projection and the Spec-Head relation. Furthermore, the focus of their studies has been onthe licensing of negative polarity items (henceforth, the NPI licensing), relative scope of negation and c-command. T he NPI licensing has been examined in terms of whether the licensing principles mainly syntactic in nature, semantic-pragmatic, or both, and whether it is autonomous in the sense that functions only for the NPI licensing or it is tied to the principles of other modules. Studies on relative scope of negation and c-command have been trying to determine to what extent, if at all, syntactic structures are responsible for the scope of negation. Keywords: generative grammar, Jesperson (1917), Klima (1964), formal representation of negation, Negsymbol, NegPprojection, Spec-Head relation, NPI licensing, scope of negation and c-command