BiblioVault - Books about Negation

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics

Negation, Tense, and Clausal Architecture

Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger, and Paul H. Portner, Editors

Georgetown University Press, 2006

Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data.

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

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An Essay on Negation

For a Linguistic Anthropology

Paolo Virno

Seagull Books, 2018

A vital addition to Seagull’s growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language.

As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world at large. What particle might this be? The word not.

In Essay on Negation, Paolo Virno argues that the importance of the not is perhaps comparable only to that of money—that is, the universality of exchange. Negation is what separates verbal thought from silent cognitive operations, such as feelings and mental images. Speaking about what is not happening here and now, or about properties that are not referable to a given object, the human animal deactivates its original neuronal empathy, which is prelinguistic; it distances itself from the prescriptions of its own instinctual endowment and accesses a higher sociality, negotiated and unstable, which establishes the public sphere. In fact, the speaking animal soon learns that the negative statement does not amount to the linguistic double of unpleasant realities or destructive emotions: while it rejects them, negation also names them and thus includes them in social life. Virno sees negation as a crucial effect of civilization, one that is, however, also always exposed to further regressions. Taking his cue from a humble word, the author is capable of unfolding the unexpected phenomenology of the negating consciousness.

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The Grammar of Negation

Jong-Bok Kim

CSLI, 2000

This book addresses three fundamental questions in the study of negation: What are the main ways of expressing sentential negation? What are the distributional properties of lexically-encoded negative elements? And, what implications do the answers to these two questions have for the theory of grammar? In answering these questions, Jong-Bok Kim investigates various aspects of negation in Korean, English, French and Italian. Addressing both empirical and theoretical issues relating to negation in these languages, he develops a nonderivational, lexicalist analysis within the constraint-based framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. This work demonstrates that a constraint-based approach can capture the distributional possibilities of negative elements and explain related phenomena simply through their lexical properties and the interaction of the elementary morphosyntactic and valence properties of syntactic heads. The resulting constraint-based theory allows a conservative division of labor between morphology and syntax.

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A Natural History of Negation

Laurence R. Horn

CSLI, 1989

This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation in natural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

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The Navya-Nyaya Doctrine of Negation

The Semantics and Ontology of Negative Statements in Navya-Nyaya Philosophy

Bimal Krishnal Matilal

Harvard University Press

The Navya-nyaya (“New Method”) school of logic has exerted a profound influence on Indian philosophy since the twelfth century. In this system, with its hierarchy of abstractions rather than of classes, the doctrine of negation is crucial. Bimal Krishnal Matilal expounds Navya-nyaya theory by systematically translating its arguments into the language of Western logic. He also provides texts and literal translations of two standard works on negation, one each from the orthodox and the radical wings of the school, and a detailed commentary of his own upon them.

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