2024. №54, 28-46
This paper aims to investigate the negation in subordinate clauses in Kazakh, exclusively focusing on the implications of structural and semantic asymmetries therein. In Kazakh, negative forms of predicates in subordinate clauses share certain properties with main clauses. For instance, the verbal predicate can be negated with the bound suffix -MA, and the nominal predicate is negated by the negative particle emes ‘not’ or existential negation žoq ‘non-existent’. Nevertheless, negation can vary across subordination, producing formal and semantic asymmetries. On the one hand, an affirmative and its negative equivalent can generate a structural asymmetry lacking one-to-one correspondence: e.g., the converb suffixes -(I)p and -A//-y have the same negative form, -MAy. On the other, an affirmative and its negative counterpart can express two different meanings, e.g. subordinate clauses based on the aorist marker -(A)r and its negative pair -MAs signal two different attitudes of the speaker towards a proposition. Moreover, negation in adverbial clauses is a rather intricate and extremely ambiguous phenomenon, since a negative converbal form in an adverbial clause can express several adverbial relations. The current study initially tests the formal and semantic asymmetry of negation in Kazakh subordinate clauses.
Keywords: Negation, asymmetry, semantic, structure, subordinate clauses, Kazakh