Polarity: whether the word can be or is negated
In Ukrainian, negation is done using the particle не which is most often written as a separate word. In some cases, depending on the part of speech and orthographical conventions, it becomes a bound morpheme, mostly with adjectives, adverbs, and some deverbative nouns. Negation is usually unmarked. However, there are several exceptions for verbs (see examples below) where it is used. The affirmative variants, which are prevailing, are not marked for negation at all.
Note that Negative=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 adjectives. (There is no such thing as “affirmative pronoun”.)
Neg: negative
Examples
Short forms of some instantenious verbs
- нічичирк the short verb form from чичиркнути “not to produce a single sound”
- нітелень the short verb form from теленькнути “to be silent, not to speak”
Negative existentials
- немає the negative impersonal verb form from мати “there are no / there are not” (It is important to differentiate this form from a similar 3rd person finite verb negative expression не має “(he/she/it) does not have”, where negation is expressed by an independent particle. Their meanings and syntactic behaviour differ.)
- чорт-мало the negative impersonal verb form from чортмати “there were no / there were not” (colloquial expression)
Polarity in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gd] [gub] [hy] [jaa] [ky] [pcm] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urj] [xcl]