Negative Grammatical Functions in Skou

Negation is known to correlate with changes of word order, agreement, or case marking in the clause. I present data from Skou, a language of north-central New Guinea, which show obliques and adjuncts appearing postverbally in the SOV positive clause and preverbally in negative clauses. Moreover, in addition to these changes in the order of constituents, the grammatical functions assigned in the negated clause are not the same as in a positive clause, with obliques and adjuncts assuming object properties in the negated clause, as well as object positions. This results in otherwise unattested trivalent constructions in the language.

1. Negation and changes in the clause

It is well known that the positive and negative forms of the same sentence may show significantly different structures. In Skou, a language of north-central New Guinea, negating a clause initiates a change in grammatical functions, in that obliques or adjuncts in positive clauses take on the properties of objects in negated clauses.¹ Differences between positive and negative clauses can be illustrated in 1a,b with examples from Kru, a language of West Africa, in which the SVO order of positive clauses becomes verb-final in negated clauses, resulting in S neg OV order (Payne 1997:290).

(1)

a.

b.

Other negation-related changes are found with do-support in English: She ate my lollies versus She did not eat my lollies, showing that in addition to the negative morpheme we also find the auxiliary verb do, which inflects for tense to the exclusion of marking on the (lexical) head of the clause. Numerous other examples of negation affecting inflection or word order can be found in the literature, with Payne 1997 providing a useful short survey and Koopman 1984 a formal treatment of the word-order issues in West African languages. Further, many languages show different aspectual possibilities in negated clauses; this is also true of Skou, but is not discussed here.

In Skou, negative clauses differ from positive clauses in more than simply the addition of a negating word, just as English and Kru (among others) show substantial differences between positive and negative clauses. In Skou, positive and negative clauses show no morphological differences other than the addition of ka ‘negative’. Examples 2 and 3 illustrate nominal and (monovalent) verbal clauses with and without negation. The negator is an invariant free particle which can constitute a complete utterance (ka ‘no’, ‘(That’s) not (so)’), and it is postverbal (if there is a verb in the clause), a pattern common in this part of New Guinea (Reesink 2002).² In clauses in which the negator appears together with an auxiliary, which is possible only for clauses with motion verbs, the negative morpheme precedes the auxiliary, showing that the negator is not strictly at the right edge of the clause. The form of the agreement marking on the verb in 3b is the same as in the nonnegated clause (3a).³

(2) Nominal predicate

a.

b.

(3) Verbal predicate

a. .

b.

The same pattern is found with bivalent predicates, in which the ergative may optionally be marked by an NP-final pronoun. In 4 the clause takes two arguments, and when negated the only difference is the addition of a clause-final negator.

(4) Bivalent verbal predicate

a.

b.

Complications arise when we consider a clause with a locative adjunct. The normal position for an adjunct location is following the verb (locations appear as bare NPs). When negated, however, the location appears before the verb, as can be seen in 5.

(5)

a.

b.

Preverbal positions are associated with subjects and objects (as in 3, 4), not with adjuncts, yet under negation a location appears preverbally. I examine here the syntax of negation, including the syntactic consequences of this change in position and the range of participants that participate in this ‘negative alternation’.

I should note that the most common way for locations to be ‘expressed’ in negated clauses is by omission. While 5b is an accurate translation of ‘He didn’t stay in the chair’, by far the most common way informants will translate such a...