Page 433 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

The first ndo may be omitted. Postverbal nao is, with few exceptions, sentence-final. However, in sub- ordinateclausesonedoesnotfindsentence-finalNEG:
In Dahl's language sample only Bengali and Tamil are in fact quoted as having the order SOV + NEG, where NEGis an uninflected particle which seems to have developed out of auxiliary verbs (see Dahl 1979: 94). This kind of historical development for syntactic negation has to be noticed as another possible dia- chronic explanation for sentence-final/postverbal NEG.
6. Syntax of Negation:NEGQuantifiers
There is an important topic to be dealt with partly related to what has been said so far about the NPIS, namely the so-called 'permeable' and 'impermeable' negation, which is relevant to the syntax of NEG. The term was suggested by Tesniere (1966:235f.). There are languages which repeat the negation on every element of the sentence which can be negated:
Ru Nikto ni s kern ni o cem ne govoril
Nobody NEGwith anybody NEGabout anything NEG spoke
Eu imagine que voce" ndo tern dinheiro
I imagine that you not have money and not:
*Eu imagine que voce tern dinheiro nao.
Note also
Eu nao imagino que voce tern dinheiro nao
'I do not imagine that you have money.'
(17a)
(17b)
(17c)
The subordinate clause is not negated and the final nao represents the second NEG marker of the main verb as in (16). This is exactly the case in Afrikaans too:
He het nie gese, dot hy hierdie boek geskrywe het nie
he has NEG said that he this book written hasNEG 'he has not said that he has written this book.' (18)
All this hints at an 'afterthought' strategy as the origin of the sentence-final NEG, a kind of comment after an intonational break which later disappeared when the final position became grammaticalized as regular. Compare for this kind of pragmatic discourse strategy substandard English I'm not gonna say it, nah; or French J 'vais pas le dire, non.
The afterthought strategy may account for sen- tence-final NEG occurring also in SVO languages like
'Nobody spoke with anybody about anything' Ru Nikto nigde nikogda etogo ne skazal
(20a) (20b)
(21a)
(21b)
or: Portuguese. But this is not the only possible expla-
nobody this ever
numquam hoc ullus
said
dixit
nation. It is clear that diachronically there is a great difference between the pas or not/nicht cases (ancient postverbal 'measure objects') and that of Portuguese nao. Synchronically,however,theybelongtothesame type of NEG. Many different sources may have con- tributed to the origin of postverbal(sentence-final)NEG (see also the end of this section).
A large-scale analysis of all the languages of the world which have sentence-final or postverbal NEGhas however still to be done. In any case it seems that word order does not play a decisive role in assigning to NEG its position in the sentence—contrary to what was thought in the first attempts at typologizing according to the word order types (see Lehmann's 'structural principle' 1978:18). It is, for instance, not true that the general rule for rigid and con- sistent SOV languages is to have NEGafter the verb as is the case for Sinhalese (SOV) versus, for instance, Irish, a VSO language where NEG comes at the begin- ning of the sentence:
never this anybody said
Sinh Jon ballava dakke nd J. dog saw NEG
versus
Ir Nl fhaca Sean an madadh NEGsaw Johnthedog
both 'John didn't see the dog.'
(19a)
(19b)
*Mai una volta non ha rivolto...
Nobody nowhere never this On the other hand one finds:
NEG said
Lat
nemo hoc unquam dixit
with just one negated element. NEG is not 'permeable.' The same holds for English (for counter-examples from substandard English see the first paragraph of this article):
Nobody ever said this, or Never did anybody say this. (21c)
Between the two poles of highest permeability (as in the Russian examples) and highest impermeability (as in the Latin and English examples) there are inter- mediate stages along a 'continuum':
French
versus Italian
and not:
Pas une fois il n'a adresse la parole a personne
'He has never spoken to anybody'
Mai una volta ha rivolto la parola ad alcuno/nessunp
(22a)
(22b)
(22c)
Italian uses a NEG (or two) less than French. Returning to (21), (21 b): unquam and ullus are quan-
tifiers (an adverb and, respectively, a pronoun) which usually occur in the scope of NEGand therefore become NPIS. But NPIS which do not (yet) have full
Negation
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