A Linguistic Study on the Pattern of Negation in Bodo Language.

Abstract

Negation is a process or construction in grammatical and semantic analysis in all languages which typically expresses the contradiction of some or all of a sentence meaning. Many linguists have worked on various aspects of negation. In English grammar, it is expressed by the presence of the negative particle not or n‟t (the contracted negative); in lexis, there are several possible meanings. Different positions of the negative particle cause concomitant variations in the logical structure as well as the semantic analysis of the sentence. There are two types of negative formation that appears in many languages. One of these is formed by verbal modifiers such as not, never, hardly etc. in English. Such negative formation is called sentential negation. The other types of negative makes use of negative prefixes such as in-, dis-, un-, im-, in English and it is called affixial negation. Negative polarity items are those words or phrases which can appear only in a negative environment in a sentence. The aim of this research is also to look at the pattern of negative constructions of the Bodo language. The peculiarity of Bodo negative formation is preserved throughout the history of the language. Hitherto there has not been a commendable study on the negation in Bodo. Therefore, the available literature on the negation of Bodo language is extremely limited. The negative occurs post-verbally in Bodo. It is followed by tense and aspect markers. There are two ways of expressing negation in Bodo, one is by using the negative particles and the other is with the help of negative copula. Moreover, negation, in Bodo is also marked by using both prefixes and suffixes. Joseph Greenberg has classified the occurrence of difficult elements, which are consistent with the type of word order the language belongs to. He propounds that verb final languages exhibit post-verbal negation. This paper gives an overall picture of the negation pattern of the Bodo language.