Negation

Negation is a complex phenomenon, which, by applying different strategies, can involve either whole propositions (sentence negation) or only parts of them (phrase negation). The use of negation not only makes it possible to determine the positive or negative polarity of an utterance, but allows also to perform communicative acts such as rejecting, correcting, refusing, contradicting, lying or ironizing. In German negation basically has two realization possibilities, which are achieved by negating the predicate (negation with nicht) or a nominal element of the sentence (negation with kein). Other ways of competing with these main strategies are morphological, idiomatic and prosodic negation.