ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapters 3 and 5, negation can interact with aspect. Negation is an important concept not only in logic and philosophy but also in language. The linguistic concept of negation is even more sophisticated than that in philosophy or logic because it involves meaning as well as form. All human languages have the grammatical category of negation. However, as negation is achieved using different linguistic forms in different languages, it can demonstrate language-specifi c features. Hence we think it a meaningful attempt to explore negation from a contrastive perspective on the basis of attested language use in the two distinctly different languages that form the focus of this book.1 Note that our discussions will focus on explicitly marked negation, excluding implicit negation using such forms as hardly, few, fail, reluctant, and too . . . to; similarly we will not focus on morphologically negative words such as impossible and homeless, or on pragmatically negative rhetorical questions, because these are morphological, lexical, or discoursal features while this book is concerned with aspect-related grammatical categories.
