Negation in Veps

This chapter presents an overview of different negation strategies and diachronic changes in Veps, an endangered northwestern Uralic language belonging to the Finnic branch. Basic negation patterns in Veps share many characteristics with other northern Finnic languages. However, Veps displays a negation system with many innovations and manifests several language-specific morphosyntactic patterns, a lot of syntactic variation, and secondary lexicalization in negative phrases. Several features and syntactic changes specific to Veps, such as number agreement between the negative auxiliary and the verb in plural, alternating word order, and negative existentials increase the divergence of Veps negation in comparison with neighboring and related languages. Language contacts play a significant role as well, as lexical negation and indefinites involve a strong Russian influence, whereas in clausal negation it is not as significant.