ABSTRACT
The nucleus of the following disquisition is the material collected during many years for the chapter on Negatives in vol. III or IV of my Modern English Grammar (abbreviated MEG), of which the first two volumes appeared in 1909 and 1914 respectively (Winter, Heidelberg). But as the war has prevented me (provisionally, I hope) from printing the continuation of my book, I have thought fit to enlarge the-scope of this paper by including remarks on other languages so as to deal with the question of Negation in general as expressed in language. Though I am painfully conscious of the inadequacy of my studies, it is my hope that the following pages may be of some interest to the student of linguistic history, and that even a few of my paragraphs may be of some use to the logician. My work in some respects continues what DELBRÜCK has written on negation in Indo-European languages (Vergl. Syntax 2. 519 ff.), but while he was more interested in tracing things back to the “ursprache”, I have taken more interest in recent developments and in questions of general psychology and logic.
