A sketch of Jhar negation

Abstract

This study provides a first look at strategies of negation used in Jhar [iso 639-3: bau]. We show that Jhar’s canonical negation strategy employs a clause-final negator – rà – which is obligatory in every instance, including in contexts involving discontinuous sequences wherein rà is preceded by one of several obligatory preverbal particles that are specific to a particular modal or focus context. The negator is absent only in exceptional instances involving complex embedding. These facts together strongly suggest that Jhar’s preverbal negation strategies developed more recently and show that Jhar stands out in comparison to other languages which employ double negation but where one negator is semantically bleached, and even sometimes optional (Akumbu 2016). This study ultimately expands the scope of our understanding of negation in a regional hotbed (Idiatov 2019) of clause-final negation.