Talk:Negative verb

"The action itself is placed in an infinitive form" is not quite true in Finnish... The form depends on the tense and mood, as you can see in these examples. --Mikko Silvonen 14:26, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Copy editing required

This article needs serious copy editing so that it includes all forms of the negative verb in the F-U languages; for example, the North Sámi example makes no mention whatsoever of the supinum form of the negative verb. -Yupik 09:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

19 years later, this still seems true. The main introduction of the article contains several weaknesses:

• There is no concise definition of what constitutes a negative verb
• There is no example of a negative verb in use
• It is apparently cites work largely from a single author, Matthew Dryer, with a mostly irrelevant comment about Miestamo 2008 at the end. However, the first citation isn't even to Dryer himself but a review article of the entire WALS by another author, and the second citation to Dryer does not seem to mention negative verbs at all.
• The summary is not particularly concise or clear.

I suspect part of what's happening in the rest of the article stems from a confusion of terminology. I would think that we are talking about things like Finnish e-, which conjugates for tense and displays agreement morphology. For example, I can see how somebody would think that the alternation between ある aru vs. ない nai in Japanese might count (i.e., if nai really is the negative form of aru, I can see why somebody would think that a negative verb form counts as a negative verb). Non-scholarly sources on the internet also seem to use the term "negative verb" to mean any verb + not when describing English grammar. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

ない nai is definitely the plain/casual negative of ある aru, but it's a weird case, since ない nai normally negates other verbs/adjectives). The polite form is ありません　arimasen (negates the polite non-past form あります arimasu, with the polite past being ありません　でした　arimasen deshita). I don't have deep enough knowledge about the topic to be certain whether what's used in Japanese are properly considered a negative verbs, but it does go a bit deeper than tacking nai on the verb. nai itself is conjugated in different tenses, whereas the polite form gets added onto:

きく　kiku to hear - casual non-past negative きかない kikanai, polite non-past negative ききません kikimasen

past negative: casual きかなかった kikanakatta, polite ききませんでした kikimasen deshita

probable negative: casual きかなかろう kikanakarou , polite 聞きませんでしょう kikimasen deshou Lidarose (talk) 02:50, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Chinese and Dravidian languages sections

They explain negation, not specifically negative verbs. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 10:05, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Is the Japanese 〜ない somehow a 'negative verb', as described by the article's lead section?

I don't think the non-Uralic languages described match the definition at all. --88.113.162.167 (talk) 21:37, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

A quick Google search yields several sources for learners with explanations and conjugation tables that say that ない nai is the negative form of ある aru. This matches the (non-scholarly) citation currently given in the article, but I agree with the previous comment that this does not match the definition of negative verb, since nai does not appear to be an independent verb but a potentially suppletive form of another one. ない nai is a negative suffix elsewhere in the language, but as far as I'm aware it is usually described as a suffix, not a verb. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Needs glosses

This article needs some examples of negative verbs in action accompagnied with glosses. 2003:E6:9743:21FB:805A:B122:4D52:2111 (talk) 11:55, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

English

The section on negation in English is, at best, misleading, but is in many ways incorrect. There are no citations to work, scholarly or otherwise, and it makes a number of unsupported assumptions and assertions. There are multiple assumptions that are either ad hoc or incorrect:

• "The verbal negation predicate is 'not'." – It's not clear what predicate means here (though I think the person who wrote this means "verb"). As far as I am aware, not is not typically described as a predicate in research on English negation.
• "In English, a standard negation (SN) is used to negate declarative main clauses. The verbal negation predicate is 'not'. To negate other clauses, the negation construction differs from SN." – This is simply false.
  • Both main and subordinate clauses are also negated with not in English.
  • Interrogative clauses and imperative statements are negated with not, not just declarative sentences.
• "The English auxiliary 'do', in combination with the negative verb, indicates whether one or multiple individuals are involved" – Is not meant to be the negative verb here?
  • There are no citations for the claim that not is a verb; I'm aware of no scholarly work that makes such a claim.

I think this entire section bears removal. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)