Negator – Negative polarity items, constituent negation, existential negation, concord negation

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• The syntax and semantics of negative polarity items, constituent negation, existential negation, and concord negation

VocabularyVocabulary

NoteNegative polarity items

Negative polarity items (NPIs) negate the smallest degree of something. The phrase hurt a fly exemplifies this. When we say Emily would not hurt a fly, the meaning is that if Emily is not even willing to hurt something as small as a fly, she would not be willing to hurt anything bigger. Since essentially everything is bigger than a fly, the meaning is that Emily is not willing to hurt anything at all. Thus, NPIs strengthen the negation by asserting that the smallest degree of something does not hold. Syntactically, NPIs are only found in certain environments, prototypically in negation, conditionals, and questions. We cannot do justice to the vast literature on this phenomenon in linguistics, but for our purposes, the two key points are that NPIs are a stronger form of negation and that they are only found in certain syntactic environments. NPIs may be whole phrases such as hurt a fly, or they may be individual lexical items, such as any. The phrase κινεῖ τῷ δακτύλῳ is an example from the NT:

Noteκινεῖ τῷ δακτύλῳ

• αὐτοὶ δὲ τῷ δακτύλῳ αὐτῶν οὐ θέλουσιν κινῆσαι αὐτά (Matt 23:4)
• But they do not want to move them with their finger

Because moving something with your finger is the smallest part of your body that you could reasonably move something with, to negate it is to also negate moving something with a bigger part of your body. In this case, Jesus is rebuking the

Pharisees for being unwilling to move the burdens they place on others. They are so unwilling that they won’t move a finger to help them, nonetheless lift the burden themselves.

NoteConstituent negation

When putting focus on one element and negating another element at the same time, the latter constituent is itself negated (see Syntax C; 48.1.3.1). Instead of the negator οὐ preceding the verb, it immediately precedes the constituent being negated, e.g. Hannah threw the frisbee not to Sawyer, but to Lydia. Constituent negation differs from predicate negation in that we would still conclude from this sentence that Sylvia threw the ball, i.e. the subject still performed the eventuality named by the verb. However, the negated constituent was not a participant in that event:

NoteExistential negation

Existential negation is a negated existential sentence which uses the cleft ἔστιν (see 46.4.3). The existence of something is negated, often the existence of something within a particular location or person. Like other existential sentences, οὐκ ἔστιν comes first in the sentence (though it is not the case that every time οὐκ ἔστιν comes first that we have existential negation, e.g. John 13:16 is predicate negation):

• (594) Existential negation οὐκ ἔστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν αὐτῷ (John 8:44)
• There is no truth in him

Jesus is speaking of the devil in John 8:44. The reason why this should be interpreted as existential negation (‘there is no truth in him’) and not simple predicate negation (‘truth is not in him’) is because of the role of ἀλήθεια in the discourse. Jesus is not saying ‘truth is not in him’ (but it is in someone else); the devil is still serving as the topic (not the truth), and the existence of any truth in the devil is being negated.

NoteConcord negation

Recall that negative concord items are words like οὐδείς ‘no one’ (45.3.3.1). The syntactic pattern we saw with NCIs was that when they occurred after the verb, they required an additional negator, e.g. Παῦλος οὐκ εἶδεν οὐδένα ‘Paul saw no one.’ It is tempting to treat these like NPIs, since the negator οὐ is required, at least when οὐδένα follows the verb. However, because NCIs only use double negation in certain syntactic environments, they are best analyzed syntactically, not semantically (see Exegesis D). In other words, they probably do not have a strengthened negative meaning like NPIs do (for further discussion, see Gianollo 2022 and my interview with Chiara on The Biblical Languages Podcast).