Without any doubt, the adverb “no”—abetted by its semantic cousins “not,” “never,” “without,” and several others with a negative bent—is the most subversive word in the English language. Look how “no” undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” “No, go away; my life will be much better without you.” And if you look back at the adverbial phrase “without any doubt” that begins the first sentence above, you would see how the word “without” totally reverses the sense of “doubt” to “certainty.” Overwhelmingly powerful, “no” and its cohort can quickly and very efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement that we can think up in the English language.

We can see that to negate entire statements, “no” takes a commanding position at the very beginning of sentences. It does so with brutal efficiency: “No swerving.” “No entry.” “No, sir, minors aren’t allowed here.” On the other hand, when “no” has to do the negating within a sentence, it often assigns “not” to take its place, commanders an auxiliary verb, and positions “not” right after it: “The woman drove.” “The woman did not drive.” “The woman will not drive.” Of course, we already know that when “not” does this, the main verb relinquishes the tense to the auxiliary verb. In the example given above, the auxiliary verb “do” takes either the past or future tense, and the main verb takes the verb stem “drive.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, with the main verb remaining in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” The important thing to remember is that “not” always positions itself between the helping verb and the main verb; for it to do otherwise would be grammatically fatal: “The woman not has driven.” “The visitors not have eaten.”

In contrast, “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Watch: “The woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.” “Never” is negation in its emphatic form—demolishing an idea to the extreme.

The adverb “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.” “Have you no conscience?” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in sentences that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “All of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” This sentence is semantically problematic; it could mean that “some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate”, or that “none of the women voted for the lone female candidate.” Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not all of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”

The same caveat should be observed in using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations.” “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation and affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

When using these negative affixes, of course, we must always remember to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

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From the book Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by the author, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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One of the trickiest aspects of English grammar is dealing with reported speech, which is also called indirect speech. Basically, we are taught that when the reporting verb is in the past tense, the operative verb of the reported utterance takes one step back from the present into the past. For instance, assume that an officemate by the name of Jennifer told us this yesterday: “I am unhappy with my job.” Today, when we report that remark to somebody else, we need to change the verb in the utterance from simple present to simple past and say: “Yesterday, Jennifer said she was unhappy with her job.”

We must keep in mind, though, that it’s not only the operative verb in the utterance that changes in reported speech. The first-person form of the pronoun in the utterance (“I” in this case) changes to its third-person form (to the pronoun “she” or to the proper name “Jennifer,” depending on the choice of the person reporting the utterance), and the adjective indicating possession in the original utterance (“my”) changes to the third-person form (“her”).

The change from present to past tense in reported speech is only for starters, of course. In the various other tenses, the operative verb of the utterance likewise generally moves one tense backwards in time when the reporting verb is in the past tense, as follows:

From present progressive (assuming that the speaker is male): “I am having a problem with one of my students.” To past progressive: “He said he was having a problem with one of his students.”

From simple present perfect: “I have been bypassed for promotion by my boss.” To simple past perfect: “He said he had been bypassed for promotion by his boss.”

From present perfect progressive: “I have been analyzing the problem but to no avail.” To past perfect progressive: “He said he had been analyzing the problem but to no avail.”

From simple past: “I saw the movie twice.” To past perfect: “He said he had seen the movie twice.” (If the act being reported happened very close or almost simultaneous to the utterance, however, the simple past may also be a logical tense for the operative verb of the reported utterance: “He said he saw the movie twice.”)

From past progressive: “I was taking medication then.” To past perfect progressive: “He said he had been taking medication at the time.”

However, when the operative verb of the reported utterance is in the past perfect or in the past perfect progressive, no change is possible for it in reported speech; it stays in that tense.

Utterance in the past perfect: “The bridge had collapsed by the time I reached the river.” Reported speech: “He said the bridge had collapsed by the time he reached the river.”

Utterance in the past perfect progressive: “I had been depending on that scholarship grant for four years.” Reported speech: “He said he had been depending on that scholarship grant for four years.”

We must also always remember that when the operative verb in the utterance is in the modal form, we need to change the modal auxiliary to its past tense form in reported speech. Thus, “will” changes to “would,” “can” to “could,” “must” to “had to,” and “may” to “might.”

As examples, “I will find her without any difficulty” becomes “He said he would find her without any difficulty” in reported speech; “I can beat her anytime in chess” becomes “He said he could beat her anytime in chess”; “All past due accounts must be settled at once” becomes “He said that all past due accounts had to be settled at once”; and “I may leave anytime” becomes “He said he might leave anytime.”

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 6, 2008 © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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