Forthcoming: Negation in the world's languages I: Africa

Matti Miestamo (ed), Ljuba Veselinova (ed)

Synopsis

The three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes 43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each, following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation, negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological knowledge is essential for language description as it helps descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand, typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive linguists for their data collection.

The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages are distributed across the three volumes according to geography, following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia, Australia, North America and South America.

This book is complemented by volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/496 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/497.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Matti Miestamo, Ljuba Veselinova
  • Questionnaire for describing the negation system of a language
    Matti Miestamo
  • Negation in Beja
    Martine Vanhove
  • Negation in Kambaata
    Yvonne Treis
  • Negation in Siwi
    Valentina Schiattarella
  • Negation in Lopit
    Jonathan Moodie
  • Negation in Gyeli
    Nadine Grimm
  • Negation in Ngoreme
    Antti Laine, Rasmus Bernander, Hannah Gibson
  • Negation in Ruuli
    Eloisa Ruppert, Saudah Namyalo, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
  • Negation in Cuwabo
    Rozenn Guérois
  • Negation in Kam
    Jakob Lesage
  • Negation in Northwest Gbaya
    Paulette Roulon-Doko
  • Negation in Mankanya
    Aurore Montébran
  • Negation in Mano
    Maria Khachaturyan
  • Negation in Afrikaans
    Daniël Van Olmen, Adri Breed, Ernst Kotzé

Biographies

Matti Miestamo

Matti Miestamo is professor of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. His approach to language is mainly typological and his most central research interests relate to negation and language complexity, as well as to language documentation and description. His research output includes the monograph Standard negation: The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective (Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), a co-authored Finnish-language introductory linguistics textbook, and a digital corpus of the Skolt Saami language. His latest project Negation in Clause Combining: Typological and Usage-Based Perspectives addresses variation both within and across languages and examines the relationship between these dimensions of variation.

Ljuba Veselinova

Ljuba Veselinova is a professor of Linguistics at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main interests lie in linguistic typology, the shaping of grammar and lexicon via processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization, numerical concepts and their linguistic expressions, and cyclical processes in language change. She has done extensive work on exceptions to morphological patterns, e.g. suppletion and also on negation, specifically, its lexical encoding and independence as a functional domain. Other directions in her research include phasal polarity, the use of Geographical Information Systems for language studies, linguistic cartography as well as language documentation and description.

Héloïse Calame

Héloïse Calame is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. She graduated from the same university's Master's programme in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities in 2024 with minor studies in Indigenous Studies. She has mainly worked on negation in a typological framework, both as a research assistant in Matti Miestamo's project on Negation in Clause Combining, as well as in her Master's thesis, which focused on the interaction of negation and evidentiality from a typological perspective. Her research interests include typology, negation, evidentiality, as well as language endangerment, documentation and description. Her doctoral studies are centered on the description of the endangered language Moré spoken in the Bolivian Amazon.

Book cover

Published

January 31, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Research on Comparative Grammar

Online ISSN

2749-781X

Print ISSN

2749-7801
Cite as
Miestamo, Matti & Veselinova, Ljuba (eds.). Forthcoming. Negation in the world's languages I: Africa. (Research on Comparative Grammar). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Matti Miestamo, Ljuba Veselinova, Héloïse Calame; Martine Vanhove, Yvonne Treis, Valentina Schiattarella, Jonathan Moodie, Nadine Grimm, Antti Laine, Rasmus Bernander, Hannah Gibson, Eloisa Ruppert, Saudah Namyalo, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Rozenn Guérois, Jakob Lesage, Paulette Roulon-Doko, Aurore Montébran, Maria Khachaturyan, Daniël Van Olmen, Adri Breed, Ernst Kotzé

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