NEGATION
I. We can negate:
1) The verb:
e.g. He is NOT an engineer.
He canNOT
swim.
I do NOT
know him.
2) A part of
the sentence:
a) Su e.g. Nobody
came yesterday.
b) NP e.g. He is nothing to me.
c) Compl. e.g. I saw nothing there.
I spoke to nobody.
He is nowhere to be
found.
II. We negate with negative pronouns, adjectives, adverbs.
No one anyone
Nobody anybody
Nothing =NOT+ anything
Never ever
Nowhere anywhere
Neither either
III. Other negative items: little, few, only, seldom, rarely, hardly, scarcely, barely, without.
e.g. He seldom
speaks to anyone.
Few people know anything about him.
I have hardly any money.
I can hardly see in the dark.
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I met some
friends of mine.
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I didn’t meet any
friends of mine.
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I’ve read about this somewhere.
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I haven’t read about this anywhere.
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They’ve eaten already.
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They haven’t eaten yet.
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He’s still
sleeping.
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He isn’t sleeping any longer.
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He sometimes
phones me.
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He never/seldom
phones me.
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They read too many books.
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They don’t read very
many books.
(Ei nu citesc prea multe carti.)
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Mary is coming, too.
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Mary isn’t coming either.
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Negative patterns:
1) NEITHER … NOR …
e.g. We ate neither
liver nor pork. = We didn’t eat either liver or pork.
2) EITHER … OR …
e.g. You can have either
liver or pork.
3) BOTH … AND …
e.g. We ate both
liver and pork.
NOTE: No none
means ‘nimeni’; none has the same translation as neither, the difference between them being that none implies the selection out of more than two members, whereas neither always implies neither of the two.
