Internegatives

Internegatives are a linguistic class of negation that directly refers to a collective or group of persons, rather than to an action or event alone. Unlike simple negatives, which modify a predicate, internegatives function semantically as a pointer to the collective actors responsible for a negation. The term was coined by linguist Dr. Elena Vasiliev in 2012 during a study of joint responsibilities in social contracts. Vasiliev noted that many languages employ a distinct negation form when speaking of “the group did not” in a way that emphasizes the collective accountability. For example, in several Bantu languages a clitic is attached to a verb to indicate that several noun phrases that form a single semantic unit are acting together. In English the most common expression of internegative is the construction “the committee never” or “the team won’t” when these refer to all members.

Internegatives differ from phrasal negatives in that they cannot be omitted without losing the referential quality. They often appear where the predicate expresses an agreement or oath that must be made by a whole group. Internegatives also interact with perspective markers, because the negation implicates a shared viewpoint. The concept is being studied in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and computational modeling. Compared with locality‑based negation, internegatives provide a finer-grained marking of social roles in speech.