Negation and Constituent Ordering
The addition of a marker of sentential negation to an affirmative sentence can give rise to effects in the morpho-syntactic make-up of the sentence. This chapter examines selected instances in languages where the constituent ordering of a sentence including a sentential negation marker differs from that of the corresponding non-negative sentence. For the data examined in this chapter, the greatest number of affirmative/negative ordering contrasts are observed when the negative is initial and especially when it has the characteristics of a verb. But disruptions to constituent ordering are found also when the negative is medial or final, and not just with negative verbs, but also when the negative is a particle or an affix. The study of disruptions in the surface sequencing of constituents in negative sentences has the potential to improve our understanding both of the possible location of negation in clauses and of syntactic processes more generally.