Concerning some Issues of Negative Constructions in Georgian

Abstract

The interaction of negative units in languages is an important issue on morpho-syntactic levels. The general classification reveals three types of languages: with single negation, double negation and negative concord. It is a widely accepted opinion, that Georgian is a language with negative concord, although the experiment showed that double negation is much more preferred for native-speakers. 

The two peculiarities have been revealed while learning the negation in Georgian: I. If a negative word precedes the verb, then the verb can appear in either positive or negative form, while if the verb precedes the negative word, then it must be in negative form obligatorily; II. It is not allowed to split (to separate with positive form) the negative concord. The linguistic experiment of negative constructions in Georgian was performed at 23 young Georgian native speaker students. The given sentences were put in priority order depending on what was more acceptable for them individually. The ungrammatical constructions received special zero marking. The experiment was hold with EU standard ethic norms, and the informed consents were signed by the participants, who granted me the rights to use the material with any kind of scientific purposes.  The presented experiment overviwed the three clasters of sentenses, and its results showed that the free word order, which is significant for the Georgian language, creates a very interesting case of a big number of acceptable variations. It is important, that this experiment confiremd the above mentioned two limitations for the negative constructions in modern Georgian.   It should be said that, by the way, it would be quite interesting to reveal dialectal differences in terms of the production of negative constructions. Here it should be important to take into account different types of dialectal characteristics, which are reflected in the language with mirror-like asymmetry.