STATUS OF THE NEGATIVE FEATURE IN THE ENGLISH AND BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the linguistic phenomenon of negation with empasis on English non-verbal negation and its Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian translational equivalents (henceforth, BCS). In this paper theanalysis of negation is developed against the background of the Principles and Parameters framework, more specifically the more recent Minimalist Program. This paper aims to identify the similarities and differences between English and BSC regarding the negative feature (henceforth, neg-feature) and its interpretability (interpretable or uninterpretable neg-feature) on English absolute negators such as nobody/nothing and BCS n-words such as niko/ništa. It is observed that sentential negation in English can be expressed only by the presence of negative constituents, whereas this option is not available in BSC. This observation is used to test the hypothesis that English and BSC differ according to the interpretability of the neg-feature on negative constituents. Namely, the analysis shows that the neg-feature of English negative constituents is interpretable, while the neg-feature of BCS negative constituents is uninterpretable. Therefore,the neg-feature of BCS negative constituents must be checked against the interpretable neg-feature on the negated predicate. Keywords: negation, absolute negators, n-words, neg-feature, interpretability of neg-feature

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