earticle

영어

As Brown (2007) and Weinreich (1976) say, negation is a linguistic universal and deserves studying. English negation has been traditionally classified according to four criteria, that is, sentence vs constituent negation, internal vs external negation, number of negatives and scope of negation, but also can be classified by several more criteria. And the characteristics of negative sentences can be best understood when compared with positive sentences. Accordingly, this study first classifies negative sentences and then distinguishes negative sentences from affirmative ones in terms of seven categories. The seven categories are either-conjoining, negative appositive tags, tag-questions wihout ‘not’, neither tags, negative agreement responses, nonassertive items and assertive items. In particular, English negation is hard to interpret when combined with quantifiers, because of the difficulty in determining the scope both of the negatives and the quantifiers. Consequently, the scope of negation with quantifiers is an interesting subject matter for many linguists.