Negation (linguistics)

Negation (linguistics)

In linguistics and grammar, affirmative and negative are terms of opposite meaning which may be applied to statements, verb phrases, clauses, and some other utterances. Essentially an affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity or truth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. Examples are the sentences "Jane is here" and "Jane is not here"; the first is affirmative, while the second is negative.

The grammatical category associated with affirmative and negative is called polarity. This means that a sentence, verb phrase, etc. may be said to have either affirmative or negative polarity (its polarity may be either affirmative or negative). Affirmative is generally the unmarked polarity; the negative is marked by a negating word or particle such as the English not, German nicht, Swedish inte, and so on, which reverses the meaning of the predicate. The process of converting affirmative to negative is called negation – the grammatical rules for negation vary from language to language, and a given language may have more than one way of producing negations.

Affirmative and negative responses (especially, though not exclusively, to questions) are often expressed using particles such as yes and no, where yes is the affirmative and no the negative particle.