ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book briefly introduces the forms of English negation and their main syntactic features. It also looks at some facts from a typological perspective, and highlights some problems that standard accounts do not seem to explain satisfactorily. The historical development of English negation shows several of the phenomena introduced so far, but also presents peculiarities. One of the main typological differences between European languages as regards negation concerns the position of the main negator in the sentence. This element extends its scope over the whole predication, but it is significant that its position can vary, in fact tends to vary, over time. Several typological studies have tried to establish a correlation, in a number of languages, between 'basic' or unmarked word-order types and the positions of main sentential negators.
