3 Responses to “Negative Morphemes”

1. Matthew Dryer Says:
   June 8th, 2009 at 9:12 pm

   Due to a programming error, both the 2005 edition (the hard atlas) and the 2008 online edition severely undercounted the number of languages with double negation. Approximately 40 languages with double negation were incorrectly classified in one of the other types, though they were classified “correctly” in the sense that languages that employed double negation with two negative particles were classified among languages with negative particles and languages that employed double negation with two negative affixes were classified among languages with negative affixes. This will be corrected in the 2009 online edition.

   Also, the chapter text for the 2008 online edition incorrectly reversed the labels for the second and third feature values (negative particles and negative auxiliary verbs).

2. Ives Goddard Says:
   April 27th, 2011 at 4:21 pm

   Menominee (Bloomfield 1962) and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet (D.F. Sherwood, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy Verb Morphology, Ottawa, 1986) both have double negation, with a negative particle and a negative suffix.

3. Matthew Dryer Says:
   April 27th, 2011 at 8:34 pm

   This is exactly how I code these two languages and how they will appear in the 2011 online edition. These errors are due to the general error mentioned on this page whereby 40 or so languages with double negation were incorrectly coded in the original WALS due to a programming error.

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