Re: OT: Negation as the indicative standard

In _Language Typology and Syntactic Description_ ed by Timothy Shopen, the
chapter on negation (by John R. Payne) says that means of negation "all involve
the _addition_ of a negative morpheme to a corresponding positive sentence.
There may be further modifications to the sentence, like a change in word order
or in tone pattern, but standard negation never seems to be realized by such
modifications alone."

OTOH, I now seem to recall reading somewhere about a language (in Africa?)
that allegedly expressed negation solely by a change of tone (on the verb, I
think).

Doug

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