Let’s revisit the very important matter of negation in English.
We all know that the adjective “no”—as do its semantic cousins “not” and “never”—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.” Doubtless the most subversive single word in English, “no” when placed right before an assertion negates it with brutal efficiency: “
No parking.” “
No swerving.” “
No overloading.” “
No election cheating.”
And when the negating job has to be done within a statement, “no” often takes the form of “not,” commanders the auxiliary verb “do” (in the required tense) and positions itself right between it and the action verb’s bare infinitive form: “The woman
did not resist.” “The felon
did not hesitate.” “The three computer engineers
did not migrate.”
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, which remains in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman
has driven.” “The woman
has not driven.” Always, “not” positions itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.
In contrast to the other “no” variants, the word “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Look at how freely it positions itself: “That woman
never drives.” “
Never does the woman
drive.” “The woman
has never driven.” “
Never has the woman
driven.” “The woman
never has driven.”
The adjective “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting its absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “
Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see
no sign of reconciliation.” 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 statements that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “
Not all of the women in the district
did not vote for the lone female candidate.” That sentence is semantically problematic and confusing; it could be interpreted 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 by not 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 “use
less.”
When using these negative affixes, however, we must firmly keep in mind 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.
Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
How to form our negative sentences correctly This essay appeared as Chapter 151 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.(Next:
When the word “only” goes haywire) February 22, 2024
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
