37.387, Books: Negation in the World's Languages I: Miestamo and Veselinova (eds.) (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-387. Wed Jan 28 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.387, Books: Negation in the World's Languages I: Miestamo and Veselinova (eds.) (2026)

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Date: 23-Jan-2026
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Negation in the World's Languages I: Miestamo and Veselinova (eds.) (2026)


Title: Negation in the World's Languages I
Subtitle: Africa
Series Title: Research on Comparative Grammar
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/495

Editor(s): Matti Miestamo, Ljuba Veselinova

eBook

Abstract:

The three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a
major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes
43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each,
following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The
questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional
subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have
been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation,
negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and
negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a
comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room
for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the
questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the
negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different
families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the
fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in
the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological
knowledge is essential for language description as it helps
descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new
questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand,
typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive
linguists for their data collection.
The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an
open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation
organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII
conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of
different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that
were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages
are distributed across the three volumes according to geography,
following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume
includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from
Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia,
Australia, North America and South America.
This book is complemented by volume II available at
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/496 and volume III available at
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/497.

Linguistic Field(s): Typology

Language Family(ies): African Unclassified

Written In: English (eng)



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