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Correlative negation in Old Persian

  • Juan Briceño-Villalobos EMAIL logo

Abstract

Negation is an operator that reverses the truth value of a proposition and it is considered an universal category (Horn 2001: xiii) since all human systems of communication contain a representation of propositional negation. Therefore, one of the most important features of negation is its markedness that sets a contrast between affirmation and negation. Said markedness is carried out in various ways by the world languages. As its standard negation, which is the most common kind of negation marking found in a given language (Payne 1985a: 198), Old Persian (OP) has nai̯, which is mainly used in assertions, while it has a non-standard, prohibitive marker, OP . Concerning correlative negation (‘neither … nor’), Old Persian systematically employs the asyndetic repetition of the negative marker, provided the notorious absence among Indo-Iranian languages of the standard negation plus the enclitic particle IIr. *-ča. The objective of this paper is to make a thorough description of this isogloss shared by Indo-Iranian languages and, in the case of Old Persian, try to contrast its data with the Achaemenid Elamite material. I believe this will shed some new light on the nature of the asyndetic repetition of the negative marker as a means of expressing correlative negation in Old Iranian.


Juan Briceño-Villalobos Department of Classics Universidad Complutense de Madrid Ciudad Universitaria Facultad de Filología Plaza Menéndez Pelayo Madrid, 28040 Spain

Abbreviations

Languages

Ach.El.

Achaemenid Elamite

Av.

Avestan

Celtib.

Celtiberian

El.

Elamite

Goth.

Gothic

Gr.

early Greek

Hitt.

Hittite

IIr.

Indo-Iranian

Khwar.

Khwarezmian

Lat.

Latin

Lyd.

Lydian

Midd.El.

Middle Elamite

MP

Middle Persian

OAv.

Old Avestan

OIr.

Old Iranian

OIrish

Old Irish

OP

Old Persian

Osc.

Oscan

Oss.

Ossetic

PIE

Proto-Indo-European

Ved.

Vedic

YAv.

Young Avestan.

Typology/Morphology

ABL

Ablative

ACC

Accusative

COOR

Coordination

DAT

Dative

DU

Dual

FUT

Future

GEN

Genitive

IND

Indicative

LOC

Locative

MOD.PART

Modal Particle

NEG

Negation

NPI

Negative Polarity Item

NOM

Nominative

OPT

Optative

PASS

Passive

PL

Plural

PRS

Present

PTCP

Participle

REL

Relative

SBJV

Subjunctive

SG

Singular

SN

Standard negation

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Published Online: 2020-09-18
Published in Print: 2020-09-25

© 2020 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

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