t his book applies recently developed tools in strong and weak bidirectional op- mality theory (ot ) as well as an evolutionary modeling of ot in a bidirectional setting to the empirical domain of negation across a wide range of languages. I have long been intrigued by the patterns of semantic variation we find in natural l- guage, and negation has always been one of the topics I was fascinated by. In the past, I have proposed analyses of language-specific observations about not until in English (de swart 1996), Dutch negative polarity items (n PIs) occurring outside the c-command domain of...