This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. It examines the ways in which negation is expressed in the languages of the world from a new perspective and proposes a typological classification based on the structural differences between affirmative and negative clauses, the main types being symmetric and asymmetric negation. Cross-linguistic frequencies and correlations are also examined. It is argued that functional motivations of the different types of negation can be found in the functional differences between...