Abstract

A Spanish negative sentence contains items and structures that create a suitable syntactic environment for items and item groups showing an inherent negative meaning. A large number of Spanish phraseologisms can only be used if a negation had been triggered in the same sentence or the same syntagma. The goal of this article is to analyse different cases and rules linked to the triggering of negation in the Spanish language in order to provide a basis for drawing conclusions about their systematic use in Spanish phraseography. This article will show entries taken out of the Diccionario español-alemán de locuciones del español de España, a work which is currently being elaborated by a team of students, linguists and translators, and evaluate their significance as an alternative to present phraseographic solutions.