Expressing sentential negation across languages

Each language employs its own grammatical device to express negation. This positional paper discusses four main ways of negation we find in natural languages: morphological negative, auxiliary negative, adverbial negative, and clitic-like negative. The paper first critically reviews derivational views in accounting for the grammatical properties of these four different types of negation and then offers a Construction-based HPSG analysis for each type. It argues that it is more viable to admit different morphological and syntactic categories of negation rather than to posit the uniform syntactic category Neg for all these types of negation. The paper also shows that it is more optimal to allow a modular approach between morphology and syntax, while allowing tight interactions among different grammatical levels.