Subject negation in Sesotho subordinate clauses

Abstract

This article examines constituent negation in Sesotho. It focuses on the subject argument of Sesotho subordinate clauses viz., the hore-clause and the participial clause. It gives a brief overview of the grammatical concepts negation and subject within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program and explains how constituent negation is realized in Sesotho. It argues that Sesotho does not have a direct means of negating clausal constituents but employs negative clauses such as cleft sentences, clauses with AGRS /ho/, clauses with subject inversion and contrastive clauses. It further argues that in terms of the Neg-Criterion, Sesotho does not have non-negative operators in that its negative morphemes are bound morphemes that are strictly generated from verb stems and not from nouns and adverbs as in English.