1.5. Negatives
Every natural language has a way to express negation by using a multitude of markers, such as particles, negative words and affixes. There is an extensive variety in the number and in the use of negative markers, in their syntactic status and in their position in the clause. Moreover, negation varies in the way it interacts with different types of sentences.
We can make a distinction on the basis of scope, that is the actual parts of the sentence which are affected by negation. So, we can distinguish between sentential/clausal negation and constituent/local negation. We have a sentential/clausal negation when the negative marker takes scope over the whole clause (as in ‘John didn’t finish his paper’), whereas we have a constituent/local negation when the scope is confined to a particular constituent of the clause (as in ‘John finished his paper not long ago’). Sentential negation in LIS uses manual markers and non-manual markers.
