THE GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL PARADIGM OF THE DIACHRONIC NEGATION CATEGORY

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the grammatical and syntactical category of
negation in diachronic systems. Particular attention is paid to the problem of negation in
linguistics, and to negation as a grammatical category and syntactical category on the
morphological and syntactic level. The authors argue that, broadly speaking, negation can
be expressed in natural languages through morphological and syntactic tools. Negation is
expressed by means of a hierarchically organized system of heterogeneous linguistic units
connected by similar semantic functions. Based on this theoretical assumption, it is explained that negation as a grammatical category and as a syntactical category can be
realized on both morphological and syntactic levels. On the morphological level, negation
suffixes and individual part-of-speech paradigms are taken into account, while, on the
syntactic level, the entire negative sentence containing one or more negations is considered.
The diachronic study of the category of negation at different levels helps to observe the
development of specific parts of speech that can express negation and provides a basis for
further research on negation in different discourses and communicative situations.