Home » Education & Career » TESOL Language Training » Negative Thoughts

Negative Thoughts

© Brenda Townsend Hall

ELT course books tend to look at negative forms from a purely structural point of view. This is understandable. Forming negatives is a largely rule-bound, mechanical manoeuvre and is thus is easy to teach and to test. Underlying this concern with how to form negatives is, it seems to me, the belief that negatives are used basically as reactions - in the answers to questions or in order to contradict a statement. I wish to raise here the issue of negatives used in preference to a positive declaration. The preference for negative forms is also, under certain conditions, a particularly noticeable feature of British English.

In their functional analysis of language, and when they deal with modal auxiliaries, course books and grammar books do go some way towards acknowledging the preference for negatives . In such language functions as the expression of likes and dislikes, there is an implicit acceptance that negative forms have to be selected for the expression of dislikes:

I can't bear pop music; I can' t stand the cold; I don't like fish.

Where modal auxiliaries are concerned, the merely mechanical structural manipulation for negatives is not always possible since negatives of some modals are reserved for entirely different meanings. We have only to ponder the effect of making the following verbs negative in a purely structural way:

you must come to dinner; you must have a passport; you can smoke if you like; we must go a long way to find a specimen as perfect as this.

Similarly, the verbs below cannot have their meaning simply reversed if the negative is removed:

you can't be serious; they shouldn't be long; it needn't always be like this.

However, while these aspects of negation are well observed, little emphasis seems to be placed on the particular attitudes that are conveyed, and the effects that are achieved, when negative structures are deliberately selected. One of the most obvious examples of such a deliberate choice is the use of a negative question. This conveys surprise or irritation on the part of the questioner and shows the hearer that s/he is in some way out of step with normality:

• Don't you eat fish?
• Can't you drive?
• Is it not incumbent upon this government to intervene?
• Haven't you got any change?

Sometimes the negative question can be used to indicate that the hearer is expected to agree with the speaker:

Isn't it a lovely day?
Don't they make an attractive couple?

Sometimes a negative question can be quite sinister in its effect, amounting to an accusation that someone is lying or, at least, concealing the truth:

The copyright of the article Negative Thoughts in TESOL Language Training is owned by . Permission to republish Negative Thoughts in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.