Nonnegation

Nonnegation is a term used in philosophy of language, logic, and linguistics to refer to the absence or rejection of negation in a proposition or utterance. In formal logic, negation is the operation that flips the truth value of a proposition; a sentence expressed without the negation operator is said to be in a nonnegated form. The concept is primarily about polarity: positive (nonnegated) statements versus negative (negated) ones. In standard truth-functional logic, the content p without the negation ¬p is considered nonnegated.

In linguistics, nonnegation describes the affirmative polarity of statements. Some languages mark negation overtly with particles or affixes, while others rely on context or prosody. The study of nonnegation overlaps with polarity theory, where sentences are analyzed as carrying positive or negative polarity, which can influence the licensing of certain operators like existential or universal items, or stance markers.

Double negation, in which two negations cancel to produce an affirmative content in many logics, illustrates the relationship between negation and nonnegation. Nonnegation is distinct: it denotes the lack of an explicit negation operator, not the presence of a stronger form of assertion.

Examples: "The cat is on the mat" is a nonnegated, affirmative sentence; "The cat is not on the mat" is negated. In some logical systems, nonnegation may be treated as a primitive or as the default state of proposition content, rather than as a specialized operator.

See also: negation, polarity, affirmation, double negation.