Negation in English and Yala Languages

Abstract

Negation is a denial, or a way of expressing a rejection of a positive proposition. It is a universal feature of human language in the sense that every language has a way of expressing a denial of fact, action, idea, or some such thing. Seeing that every language has a way of expressing negation, it was the aim of this work to examine the contrasts that exist in the ways in which negation is expressed in English and Yala languages. Yala is among the Idomoid group of languages. These languages are chosen due to their contact situation as well as the need that arises for comparative linguistics when languages come in contact. The study reveals that significant differences exist between the negation strategies of English and Yala languages; English is said to have more negation operators than Yala, thus displaying a fairly richer morpho-syntactic process in terms of negation. However, while the scope of negation commands certain phonological changes in Yala, it does not in English. It is also evident from the study that negation is marked with the use of cleft-like sentences in both languages. Moreover, in English, modal negation may have a wide or narrow scope, while in Yala, modal negation usually has a narrow scope. It was found from the study that to express non-modal negation, English and Yala use ‘not transport’; however, English marks non-modal negations through other means as well. Therefore, contrastive statements are made after establishing contrasts in different aspects of negation in both languages, and predictions of difficulty are made after each contrastive statement. The essence of the contrastive statement and predictions is to help teachers of Yala learners to place in the proper perspective the problems of the learners in relation to English negation.