Polarity: whether the word can be or is negated
| Values: | Neg | Pos |
In Middle Armenian, negation is mostly done using the bound morpheme չ-, an independent negative auxiliaries (equivalent to English “not”) ոչ and չի. Words that can take the morpheme of negation have the feature of polarity.
It applies to verbs, auxilaries and some particles. See also the related feature Connegative.
Note that Polarity=Neg is not the same thing as PronType =Neg. For pronouns and other pronominal parts of speech there is no such binary opposition as for verbs and auxilaries. (There
is no such thing as “affirmative pronoun”.)
A set of non-productive prefixes, ան-/an-, ապ-/ap-, դժ-/dž, տ-/t-, չ-/č- can be used for negating a lexicalized set of adjectives, e.g. անալի/anali “unsalted”, ապամորթ/apamort’ “skinless”,
դժպատահութիւն/džpatahowt’iwn “irrelevance”, տխօս/txòs “taciturn”, չնման/čnman “matchless”. We do not mark adjectives for the Polarity feature.
Pos: positive, affirmative
Examples
- ասաց/asac’ “he said”
- են/en “they are”
- պիտի աւտալ/piti awtal “one should believe”
Neg: negative
Examples
- չասաց/časac’ “he did not say”
- չեն/čen “they are not”
- չպիտի աւտալ/čpiti awtal “one should not believe”
Polarity in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gd] [gub] [hy] [jaa] [ky] [naq] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urj] [xcl]