Negation in Standard Arabic Revisited: A Corpus-Based Metaoperational Approach

The standard assumption of the present study is that the speaker’s processing strategy in discourse is the key to understanding the logic of negating in Standard Arabic (SA). Paradoxically, the metalinguistic richness of negation in SA, compared with English and French for instance, has not triggered any significant research that attaches due importance to the context of production and reception of utterances and accounts for the working of negators from a contrastive perspective. Rather, traditional approaches to Arabic syntax still dominate the grammatical landscape and continue to exercise unquestioned authority in pedagogical grammar. The paper shows that these approaches are inadequate, unsystematic and heavily handicapped by direct assignment of chronological meaning to formal negators. By offering a framework for systematic analysis of negation in relation to affirmative utterances on one hand, and to the binary micro-system Phase 1/Phase 2 on another, the study suggests a redefinition of the status, scope and values of six negators – lam, leisa, maa, laa, lan and lammaa – as well as their counterparts in the affirmative pole.