ABSTRACT
As always at the centre of linguistic meta-discourse, negation is the object of several studies in Modern English grammar. This chapter deals with some of these studies, and aims at showing how the phenomenon has been treated from several theoretical points of view, and with what results. The first cluster of issues related to English negation that the author reviews concerns the placement of the main negator in the clause, and the relative heuristic problem concerning its scope. These issues have first been studied in a systematic way, within modern linguistics, by E. S Klima (1964), whose work still remains a valuable reference and a starting point for most analyses of this kind. Other variation in ordering can also be related to questions of focusing but is rather marginal; the most common cases concern the placing of adverbs of various kinds in negative contexts.
