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Re: OT: Negation as the indicative standard

From:Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Date:Sunday, January 18, 2004, 21:51
--- Axiem <axiem@...> wrote:
> My Symbolic Logic professor wondered something > to those of us in the > class interested in linguistics the other day. He > notes that English, along > with a lot of other languages, states indicative > sentences in the > affirmative "I went to the store" "It is red", and > that to negate a > sentence, an extra particle (morpheme?) must be > added. In English, it's > not:: "I did not go to the store" "it is not red" > (forgiving change in > conjugation).
<snip> Any verb that has an opposite could be used that way: It is cloudy vs it is not cloudy It is not clear vs it is clear --gary