The category of negation in language competence

candidate of pedagogical sciences, associate professor at German philology and methods of teaching German

Пасічник Н.І., Закордонець Н.І., Обіход І.В. Категорія негації в мовній компетенції

Дана стаття є дослідженням категорії негації в авторському дискурсі як феномена, який ще недостатньо досліджений. У роботі розглядаються способи і засоби вираження негації, роль діахронічного та синхронічного аспектів. Поняття негації належить до понять узагальнення і співвідноситься з різними сферами матеріального світу. Це одна з основних філософських категорій, таких, як час, простір і число, які представляють основні характеристики матеріального світу. Відповідно до діалектики поняття негації є одним із найважливіших елементів. У світлі матеріалістичної діалектики негація є компетентною і самостійною категорією щодо ствердження і становить з ним діалектичну єдність. Негація як логічне поняття є вираженням негативних відношень між поняттями за допомогою спеціальних мовних засобів. У мові, як і в об'єктивній дійсності, негація співвідноситься зі ствердженням і складає з ним парну категорію. Проблема негації вивчалася багатьма вченими у ізних аспектах. Наприклад, І. Кант і Арістотель розглядали питання рівності та нерівності між заперечними і ствердними висловлюваннями. Є. Кліма досліджував місце негації в структурі граматики. Г Тотті присвятив своє дослідження контрастивному аналізу заперечення в англійській мові та письмі. Актуальність проблеми, що досліджується, зумовлена неабияким інтересом до вивчення розвитку окремих частин мови, які можуть бути засобами вираження категорії негації, та комплексним дослідженням системи негації, тобто поряд з дослідження логіко-лінгвістичної категорії негації та функціональної парадигми негації. Метою згаданої роботи є дослідження категорії негації на філософському, морфологічному, лексичному та синтаксичному рівнях, що передбачає розв'язання наступних завдань для системного опису, щоб окреслити різноманітні засоби вираження негації в загальному дискурсі та конкретизувати систему негації в структурі англійської мови.

Ключові слова: категорія негації, парадигма негації, діалектична єдність, філософські категорії як час, простір і число, об'єктивна реальність, ствердження.

Main part

Statement of the problem in a general form and its connection with important scientific or practical tasks. The notion of negation belongs to the notions of generalization and correlates with various spheres of the material world. It is one of the main philosophical categories as time, space and number that represent basic characteristics of the material world. According to dialectics the notion of negation is one of the most important elements. In the light of materialistic dialectics negation is a competent and independent category concerning affirmation and makes a dialectical unity with it. Negation as a logical notion is an expression of the negative relations between the notions with the help of special language means. In language, as in the objective reality, negation correlates with affirmation and makes a pair category with it.

Analysis of the latest research and publications on this topic, selection of previously unsolved parts of the general problem, to which this article is devoted. In comparison with affirmation, for whose expression no means besides «yes» are used, there are special language means for negation's expression. But every single language has its own system of the concrete linguistic means that preserves common to mankind notion of negation and chooses the leading way of negation's denotation. So, taking into consideration the fact that all the logical categories are general for all people, it is important to mention that the language forms and rules of their functioning are different. A single negative judgment can be expressed in different ways, even within the framework of one language, because every language has various means of negation's expression. When there are no contradictions connected with the negation's definition as the general language category in the linguistic literature, where it comes to the expression of the negative relations between the notions, there exist many terms to define the same phenomenon when describing the category of negation.

«Negation is a challenging and difficult subject that has posed some problems for philosophers, logicians, psychologists, and linguists alike» declares the American linguist Laura Hidalgo Downing. There was a great interest in negation of scholars and philosophers all over the world. Many problems of negation in English have been treated, although this was coincidentally. Many problems have attracted particular attention, and one may even speak of a canon of problems to which scholars have been drawn, generation after generation. Such problems have to deal with the phenomen of negation in communication, negative scope, double negation [1, р. 121].

In comparison with negation affirmative seems to be quite straightforward; while negation is difficult to define and describe. Negation plays a crucial role in the philosophical and psychological traditions as a background to the more linguistically oriented discussions. Negation occupies also the central position in the tradition of Western thought, which introduces concepts that have been extremely influential in the way negation has been understood.

L. Hidalgo Downing states that negation is one of the major controversial issues discussed by philosophers (Aristotle, I. Kant), psychologists (B. Russell) and linguists (O. Jespersen, Sir R. Quirk, D. Bolinger, D. Sankoff) for centuries [2, p. 152].

Most of the books are concerned with issues that derive from philosophical and logic problems of sentences where negation is involved. And only today the properties of negation in language use have been studied.

Forming of the purpose of the article. The objective of the paper is to investigate the category of negation on philosophical, morphological, lexical and syntactic levels that presupposes solving the following tasks for a systematic description to outline various means of expressing negation in general discourse and to specify a system of negation in the structure of the English language.

Presentation of the main material of the study with a full justification of the obtained scientific results. It is a well-known fact that negation in natural languages has different properties from those of negation in logic. So, logical category of negation is manifested in the law of contradiction. This law states that two contradictory statements cannot be true and at least one of them is false. It means that one statement is obligatory false. Whether the other statement is necessary, however, as Laura Hidalgo Downing suggests, considering the characteristics of negation as a logic operator for two reasons:

1) properties of logical operators are also present in natural language;

2) to establish the points where natural language differs from logic.

In logic, negation has the status of an operator that forms a compound sentence with a truth value that is opposite to the truth value of the sentence it operates on.

So, in logic due to the absence of any phonetic resources it is possible to have only a clause negation, and in natural language having in one's disposal word stresses and focuses we can also form local negation.

So, it is quite understandable that negation in language needs to be considered from a broader perspective than that offered by logic but at the same time taking into consideration all concepts of the existence of negation in the mentioned science.

The category of negation can be examined from different views. The Concept of Overcoming False Information regards negation as a means of expression some information about nonadequacy of thought to reality, as a means of overcoming false information, prevention of either fault or error. The representatives of pure logic (I. Kant, P. Natorp) are the adherents of this concept. They stated that negation exists only in thoughts and is used but in the sense of indication to the falsity of the previous affirmative statement.

They do not acknowledge the equality of rights between negative judgement and affirmative one. To their mind, negative utterances give nothing for the real condition. Therefore, with regard to this concept, negation was understood by G. Kogen, V. Wundt as something secondary concerning the affirmative statement, and negative judgements are just judgements about judgements.

A negative statement as well as an affirmative is the form of reflecting reality, and not only judgement about judgement. As an affirmative judgement, a negative one possesses a relative independence; it is in itself important and has a significant cognitive meaning.

There are many concepts concerning the interpretation of category of negation in linguistics. According to the Psychological Concept of Negation, the last is supposed to be a purely subjective manifestation of the human mind.

This Psychological Concept of Negation is considered to be unacceptable because of its treating negation not as a reflection of reality, but as manifestation of the human mind, emotional feelings.

To conclude, it is important to distinguish the groundlessness of both concepts, because they disregard the determinacy of negation by the objective reality.

Negation as a grammatical category embraces negative words and negative fields they form.

In O. Jespersen's opinion, delimiting the field of negation is a difficult task, as it is theoretically possible to take either a semantic or a formal approach to the problem. Using semantic criteria alone would pose serious problems, because of the existence of so-called inherent negatives, that is, lexical items with inherent negative meaning though positive in form [3, p. 36]. To such words belong absent, fail, lack, forget, exclude. Apart from the mostly practical difficulty of listing such words there is more serious theoretical objection to including them in a study of negatives. Though we naturally look upon them as the negative (fail - not succeed) we may logically invert the order (succeed - not fail).

Although evidence from psycholinguistic experiments suggests that certain words are basic, or unmarked with respect to negativity, such as long, good, happy, whereas their counterparts short, bad, sad are marked, or contain the negative element, it is uneasy to decide which items can be classified as negative both from a semantic and formal point of view [3, p. 36]. Words that compose the category of negation may be divided into nonaffixal and affixal (words containing the negative prefixes in-, un-, dis-, and non-, the suffixes - less and - out) on the ground that first are lexically stable and thus form closed classes (no, not, neither, nobody, none) and the rest have productive affixes [3, p. 37].

Negation can be treated as a phenomenon opposed to affirmation in various strata and on different levels of the language structure. On the semantic level there is always an opposition of positive and negative (antonymic relations), as in examples above: good - bad, thin-thick. On the morphological level when the affix denotes negation:

1) negative prefix + root: legal - illegal, regular - irregular;

2) root + negative suffix: worth - worthless.

The prefix un - is the most frequent means of expressing negation, the particle - not, negative pronouns - no one, nobody, nothing; the conjunction - neither nor [4, p. 16].

All these means constitute the negative paradigm in Modern English. The Modern English sentence is considered to be mononegative and employs a preverbial particle combined with an auxiliary/ modal have and be makes the whole sentence negative.

The two subsets of the negative expressions differ in several aspects. From the syntactic point of view, nonaffixal negation normally confers sentence negation, because it is followed by positive tag-questions and neither and not…either-tags, whereas affixal negation only negates a constituent and confers constituent negation, as is followed by the same kinds of tags as affirmative sentences, and tags with so, too.

But if we try to define this difference in a translated variant we'll see that the most suitable translations will be alike and only with constituent negation.

However, sentences with affixal and nonaffixal negation may be semantically equivalent.

At the same time concerning the question of affixal and non - affixal negation it is necessary to examine what kind of equivalence holds between sentences with affixal and nonaffixal negation and the ways of their translation.

According to the investigations made by W. Chafe in Modern English there is a tendency of the preference for adjectives with prefixal negation in written language (It is untrue) and the preference of the constructions such as It is not true in spoken language [5, p. 58]. He claims that such evidence is to a large extent conditioned by the different discourse strategies used in speech and writing. Affixal negation and nonaffixal negation do not always have the same meaning and may be ambiguous: not easy - нелегкийand uneasy - незручний, стурбований.

Therefore the use of affixal and nonaffixal negation in English is governed by a number of constraints and besides the relations between English and Ukrainian affixal and nonaffixal negation are not direct taking into consideration their interpretations.

Returning to the determination of negative words it is necessary to mention, that negative words are defined as what Gunnel Tot - tie describes as «formally and semantically negative expressions», that is the negative words no, not, n't, never, neither, nor, no one, none, nowhere, nobody, nothing; in addition to the words containing the negative prefixes in-, un-, dis-, a-, non-; and the words containing the suffix - less, and the word without [1, p. 204]. He was the first to establish the difference between affixal (morphological) negation and nonaffixal (syntactic) negation and calculate the frequency of syntactic negation types.

In broad semantic terms negation can be expressed in morphologic and syntactic ways in natural language. The main problem involved in the identification and classification of negative words has been the lack of correspondence between word content and word form. For example, there are words with no overt mark of negation (absent, fail, lack, and forget) but which, however, are generally understood to convey a negative meaning, and also, there are cases where there is a lack of fit between the grammatical structure of an utterance and its force. In the later case, we may have negative utterances with the force of agreement, or conversely, affirmative utterances with the force of refusals.

E. Klima was the first to attempt to establish a formal distinction between words that could be identified as negative both in form and meaning and words that are negative in meaning but not in form [6, p. 248]. Since then, the tests of co-ocurrence of negative words with nonassertive terms, such as any and either in coordinated structures and the combination with positive tags, have been standardly applied to identify what have been called explicit negatives.

By explicit negatives the following group of negative words is understood: not, n't, no, nobody, no one, nowhere, nothing. These words are negative in meaning, they are marked morphologically for negation and the follow cooccurence restrictions that single them out as syntactically negative.

R. Quirk and S. Greenbaum refer to them as to clausal negation [7], T. Givon as to syntactic negation [8] and L. Downing as to nuclear negatives [1].

Syntactic negation usually includes also the group of broad negatives or seminegative words formed by the adjuncts hardly, scarcely, seldom, rarely, and the determiners few and little. Although these words have negative meaning, they have no morphological indication of a negative affix or particle, unlike the negatives mentioned previously.

Traditionally, in English a sentence becomes negative by adding a negator not to the first (auxiliary) or the only verb. In Modern English there exist three types of negation:

1. Negation in the system of language (clause negation), due to which a whole sentence syntactically is considered as negative;

2. Negation in the system of discourse (local negation), in which only one component is negated and not the whole sentence;

3. Negation in the system of sentence (predication negation) relating only to certain auxiliary verbs, in which only predicative part is negated [9, p. 84].

While a yes-no question normally challenges the validity of predication as a whole, negation rejects it. And like yes-no questions, negative sentences involve the operator, requiring the insertion of not (or the affixal contraction - n't) between the operator and the predication.

There are two various ways of giving emotive intensification to a negative. For example, by any means and (informally) a bit are common alternatives to at all as non-assertive expressions of extent. Negative determiners and pronouns are given emphasis by at all, whatever.

In recent grammatical theory a great interest has been shown in the scope of negation. It can be defined as the semantic influence that the negative item exercises over the constituent of the clause where it appears, or the semantic domain on which negation applies. Usually, all the constituents of a sentence that follow the negative fall under the scope of negation, while the subject remains outside. This can be observed by the fact that assertive forms can occupy the subject position, while nonassertive forms will be found in other positions.

Here the nonassertive form any lies within the scope of negation. The subject pronoun some is outside the scope of negation, because the scope of negation in a given sentence extends to the end of the clause. Assertive forms can sometimes occupy the position following the verb carrying the negative, but in this case, the meaning is different from that expressed by a corresponding clause with a nonassertive form.

The scope of negation can be indicated by means of contrastive stress, which narrows down the scope of negation to the constituent that receives the focus, leaving the rest of the clause presupposed.

According to R. Quirk a negative form may be said to govern or determine the occurrence of a non-assertive form only if the latter is within the scope of the negation, either within the stretch of language over which the negative meaning operates [7, p. 173]. The scope of negation normally extends from the negative word itself to the end of the clause, or to the beginning of a final adjunct. The subject and any adjuncts occurring before the predication normally lie outside it. The operator is sometimes within, and sometimes outside, the scope. In cognitive approaches to negation, the notion of scope must be further understood as a complex conceptualization process that arises from the interaction of two predicates or structures [1, p. 46].

Research conclusions and prospects for further research in this scientific direction. Having analyzed the theoretical material which reflects already accumulated scientific knowledge in the sphere of investigation of negation and having formulated our own vision of the problem it is possible to make the following conclusions. The category of negation is a very romplicated and multifaceted issue in the sphere of logic as well as in the sphere of linguistics. It is possible to single out the following definitions of negation in logic and linguistics:

1. Negation is a competent and independent category concerning affirmation and makes a dialectical unity with it;

2. Negation as a logical notion is an expression of the negative relations between the notions with the help of special language means;

3. Negation is a logical operation in the result of which instead of an utterance A we have an utterance not-A, or vice versa;

4. Negation is the expression of the fact, that the effort to establish the connection between two ideas failed.

The fact is that on the surface level the utterance may be affirmative while on the deep level it may be negative and vice versa. All the components of the field are divided into affixal and nonafixal negators, among which nonaffixal negators have a multileveled system and take a kernel position.

References

1. Downing Laura Hidalgo. Negation, Text Worlds, and Discourse: the Pragmatics of fiction. USA: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 2000. 225 p.

2. Михайленко В.В. Категорія заперечення в філософії, логіці, лінгвістиці. Наук. Вісник Чернівецького у-ту. Чернівці, 2000. Вип. 27. Герм. філологія. С. 151-155.

3. Jesperson O. Negation in English and other Languages. London: Allen and Unwin, 1962. Pp. 35-86.

4. Михайленко В.В. Заперечення як комунікативний показник у діахронії. Наук. Вісник Чернівецького у-ту. Чернівці, 1997. Вип. 12 (3). Герм. філологія. С. 15-22.

5. Tottie G. No-negation and Not-negation in Spoken and Written English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Pp. 245-265.

6. Klima E. Negation in English. In the Structure of Language. Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Pp. 245-323.

7. Quirk R., Greenbaum S., Leech G., Svartvik J. A University Grammar of English. M.: Higher School Publishing House, 1982. 390 p.

8. Givon T. On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Pp. 115-190.

9. Трейбач А. Компаративна парадигма заперечення. Наук. Вісник Чернівецького у-ту. Чернівці, 2002. Вип. 136. Герм. філологія. С. 84-89.

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