Home > Catalogue > Bhasha > 1 | 1 | 2022 > Towards a Typology of Negation in South Asian Languages

Bhasha | Vol. 1 | Issue 1 | April 2022

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Research Article

Towards a Typology of Negation in South Asian Languages

John Peterson    Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Deutschland    

Lennart Chevallier    Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Deutschland    

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abstract

The present study is a preliminary typology of negation in South Asian languages, based on a database of 25 structural features for 39 languages from three language families and two language isolates. The documented features include the form of the negative marker, the relation of the negative construction to the corresponding affirmative form, whether there are different negative constructions used in different TAM categories, and whether these constructions are symmetric or asymmetric. This study also provides a first analysis of the distribution of these different negative-marking strategies throughout the subcontinent and suggests that a combination of both family bias and areal pressure are needed to account for many of the observed distributions. In some cases of language contact, the data also allows us to determine with some certainty the type of contact situation which has led to the negative-marking patterns documented in the database.

Published
April 29, 2022
Accepted
March 2, 2022
Submitted
Dec. 10, 2021
Language
EN

Keywords: Typology • South Asia • Language contact • Negation • Areal linguistics • Historical linguistics

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/bhasha/8409-3769/2022/01/005

Copyright: © 2022 John Peterson, Lennart Chevallier. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.