negasjonen

Negasjonen, or negation, is the semantic and syntactic operation that denies, contradicts, or reverses the truth of a proposition. In logic, negation is a unary connective that maps a proposition p to ¬p, flipping its truth value. In natural language, negation is realized by linguistic elements known as negators, such as not or ikke, depending on the language. The position and scope of negation can affect the truth-conditions of clauses; it commonly appears before the predicate, but can be distributed or split across auxiliary verbs in complex sentences.

Languages employ a variety of strategies for negation. Some rely on separate negation words (not, ikke, non), while others use morphological negation with prefixes or suffixes (un-, in-, non-). Some languages exhibit negative concord, where multiple negative elements co-occur but yield a single negative meaning, whereas others require a single negator per clause. The interaction between negation and tense, aspect, mood, and modal expression gives rise to phenomena such as negation of embedded clauses and neg-raising.

In semantics and pragmatics, negation interacts with polarity items and scope-taking operators, influencing inference and discourse structure. In philosophy and formal logic, negation relates to truth conditions, laws of thought, and logical equivalences such as De Morgan’s laws. The study of negation spans linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, and computer science, reflecting its central role in expressing denial, contradiction, and the absence or negation of a state or property.