Chapter 7 discusses affirmation, negation, yes/no (polar) questions, and answers in European and Brazilian Portuguese, paying special attention to the way in which each variety grammatically encodes these locutions in non-neutral contexts.

Chapter 8 treats Ivan Turgenev’s influential portrait of a nihilist in his character Bazarov from the novel Fathers and Sons. Turgenev portrays the rise of nihilism as a conflict between the older and the younger generation in Russia that took place after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. With his character sketch of Bazarov, Turgenev made the Russian nihilist movement famous throughout Europe. The story tells of the homecoming of the young Arkady Kirsanov who brings with him his friend from the university, Bazarov. The novel depicts the conflicts that arise when the two young men stay at the rural estate of Arkady’s father. Bazarov claims that nihilism is about negation, and his goal is to destroy everything and start again. When asked what his positive program is for afterwards, he surprisingly says that he does not have one. While Turgenev generally gives a sympathetic sketch of Bazarov, he cannot subscribe to his ideas. Like Jean Paul and Møller, he believes it is impossible to accept the idea that death is annihilation. His model is rather Bazarov’s simple grieving parents, who believe in something higher than death.

Negative systems have historically undergone several major changes that were caused by the overall properties of the grammatical system in particular periods. The functions of negatives in any period had to be consonant with the predicate structure, especially the structure of verbal predicates. This chapter addresses the developments of negatives that are most relevant to the establishment of the negative system of Contemporary Chinese rather than exhaustively surveying all negatives in history.

Stage 4 of the journey follows with an example of how implementation of a formal metalanguage helps with, but also hinders, the analysis of meaning of natural-language expressions. In particular, it addresses operations on sentences and introduces the connectives of propositional logic, assessing the degree of fit between them and their natural-language counterparts. In the process, it addesses the question of ambiguity and/or underspecification of the latter and concludes with some ‘food for thought’ on the usefulness of a formal semantic analysis.

This unit introduces students to the perfect tense, along with the associated regular and common irregular past participles. This tense allows students to converse about what they and others have done in the recent past and whether an action has been completed or not. It provides more practice on the use of direct and indirect pronouns when presented together and in combination with reflexive verbs. Furthermore, pronoun collocation in English and Spanish is contrasted, as are the ways in which English and Spanish deal with complex negative statements. Relevant expressions of frequency are provided.

This unit introduces students to the elemental greetings in Spanish, to nationalities and professions, enabling them to be able to give basic information about themselves and ask other people for the same. They are also introduced to subject pronouns and the present tense of ser and of reflexive verbs.

Tabbert analyses a schizophrenic offender‘s own account of his crime. She uses the stylistic toolkit to identify patterns in his language use and links them with symptoms shown by people suffering from schizophrenia. The chapter illustrates how isolating this mental illness is, leading even to committing a crime while reaching out for social companionship.

Within a system, multiple patterns of rule combination may interact in complex ways. I present a detailed analysis of Swahili verb inflection in which simple rules, composite rules and aggregated rules all enter into intricate competition, yielding an extravaganza of deviations from canonical morphotactic criteria. At the center of this discussion are three characteristics of Swahili conjugation: (i) the polyfunctionality of verbal concords (in virtue of which the same rule is used to express the noun class of a verb’s subject, that of its pronominal object, or that of a relativized argument), (ii) the expression of negation (by means of three complementary rules), and (iii) the marking of relative verb forms (whose relativized-argument affix participates in an extensive pattern of affix counterposition). The rule-combining approach to morphotactics allows the interacting details of these subsystems to be resolved into two very general types exhibiting an unexpected degree of economy.

This chapter explores what historical significance Manicheism has for the work of Frantz Fanon. It explores the role that St. Augustine’s anti-Manicheism might play in Fanon’s thinking, and the ways in which members of the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian war were deeply conscious of the historical terrain of Manicheism. This chapter argues that the quasi-Hegelian absolute negative is Fanon’s most powerful rebuke to both conventional Hegelian dialectic itself, and to the colonial manicheism that Fanon urges the colonized to overcome.

Traditional logic dominates Western thinking by centering thinking on propositions and thereby restricting the meaning of "being" to its derivative, categorial meaning. In Heidegger’s view, it fails in this way to realize the promise of a philosophical logic, one that is capable of tracing traditional logic and thinking generally back to their foundation, i.e., the being/unconcealment of the logos from which they are derived. This chapter examines how, as a first step toward realizing that promise, Heidegger questions the supremacy of logic in Western thinking through a “critical deconstruction” of four theses underlying it: the thesis that judgment is the place of truth rather than vice versa, that the copula exhausts the meaning of "being," that nothingness originates from negation rather than vice versa, and that the predicative structure of propositions constitutes the essence of language. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that the construction ultimately accompanying Heidegger’s deconstruction is to be found, not in language as Dasein’s comportment, but in the revealing capacity of tautology to which he appeals in his final seminar (1973).

This chapter reviews the role played by linguistic evidence from the Romance languages in shaping contemporary semantic research. The discussion focuses on a selection of phenomena that have important ramifications for the form–meaning mapping (presupposition, anaphora, (in)definiteness, deixis, tense, negation). For each phenomenon some particularly remarkable cases are discussed, for which research into Romance languages has substantially contributed to theoretical models and analytical advances in the field of semantics. At the same time, a number of outstanding issues are singled out, for which Romance data may prove decisive in future research. From the non-exhaustive overview provided in this chapter, two conclusions emerge most clearly. First, Romance linguistics has proven to be very influential for semantic research thanks to the wide display of microvariation within the Romance family, which represents an ideal testing ground for theories of the form–meaning interface. Second, the diachronic depth that can be reached in examining Romance data is instrumental in opening up new perspectives for research into the historical development of semantic categories.

Hausa retains the widespread Chadic three-term system of masculine singular, feminine singular, and plural (gender neutral). This is reflected in nominal forms and in agreement patterns. With a few grammatical morphemes, e.g. the Linker (na/ta/na) the masculine singular and the plural share the same marker. Tense–Aspect–Mood (TAM) is generally indicated by an overt marker after the subject pronoun and before the verb. The final n in the Completive paradigm is not a TAM marker as often said, but rather a plural formative. The marker in the Subjunctive is zero. This form historically also indicated the Aorist, which still occurs but in the negative only. The causative is and was formed syntactically using a main verb sâa ‘to cause’ (lit. ‘to put’) and not by means of a morphological extension on the verb. Indirect objects have changed significantly from Old Hausa, in word order, in the form of the marker(s), and in the specific pronouns used. Verbs in the grade system vary in their pre-indirect object usage. Reflexives are built on the noun ‘head’, the question being whether they originally might have employed ‘body’ instead, which is now found in reciprocals.

Sociolinguistic research demonstrates that speakers are ‘aware’ of some variables in their speech patterns, but not others, as evidenced by, for example, style shifting. In explaining this bifurcation, Labov (1993, 2008) suggests that speakers have a sociolinguistic monitor where ‘members of the speech community evaluate the surface forms of language but not more abstract structural features’. However, determining which linguistic variables are ‘surface’ and which are more ‘abstract’ is far from clear. In this chapter we test the sociolinguistic monitor by comparing the use of two variables which are considered to be abstract structural features - negative concord and use of never for didn't. We compare the use of these forms across two datasets: one where community members are in conversation with a community insider and another with a community outsider. We find that there is style shifting according to interlocutor with negative concord but not with never for didn’t, suggesting that only the former is ‘monitored’ in the speech of this community. These findings suggest that social pressures override similarities across linguistic structure in the operation of the sociolinguistic monitor.

Chapter 8 foregrounds the ethics and politics of the second person in ‘postcolonial’ writing, addressing the use of ‘you’ in yet two other genres, that of the essay in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and that of the short story with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ published in an eponymous collection in 2009. Kincaid and Adichie use two different techniques to have the reader reflect on her own beliefs and prejudices through a rhetoric of contrast. Kincaid targets specific readers (‘you the tourist’) as representative of the white western tourists who fly every day to her native island Antigua to get away from their daily burden. She thus reduces the reference of ‘you’ to a specific membership category she stigmatises in her very powerful interpellation of the self-centred tourists, denouncing the tourist industry her native island Antigua is subjected to. Whilst Kincaid uses direct forceful address, Adichie chooses a You type that brings the reader to align with the character’s perspective in a more indirect yet as forceful way that the pragma-linguistic analysis of the short story will precisely display.

Negation is marked by individual words (such as ‘not’, ‘no’, ‘never’) in a variety of functions (including adjunct, determiner, and head of VP) or by affixes within a word (the suffix ‘·n’t’ or prefixes like ‘un·’ or ‘non·’). Very often there is an effect on the whole clause, and negation is usefully divided into clausal and subclausal negation. There are a number of syntactic tests for clausal negation, including the ‘not even’ test and confirmation tags. Within clausal negation a further distinction exists between verb and non-verb negation.

The grammatical system in which positive and negative contrast is called polarity, and it can be absolute (e.g., ‘no’ & ‘never’) – or approximate (e.g., ‘few’ & ‘rarely’). A number of words or larger expressions have the property of being polarity-sensitive, in the sense that they occur readily in clauses of one polarity but not of the other. Some of these occur equally well in negative and interrogative clauses. We call these non-affirmative items.

The scope of negation is the part of the sentence that the negative applies to semantically.