Paslawska A. The Scope of Negation: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Prosody.

The research embraces the peculiarities of the syntactic realization of negation, its semantic interpretation, presuppositions as well as the information structure of negative sentences. The universal status of natural negation has been substantiated together with the statement that its nucleus is represented by the formal-logical correlate. A set of factors determining mono- or polynegation in languages has been established. The theoretical model of the cyclic development of negation has been elaborated. The concept of acquiring speech habits of negating has been presented. Four domains of negation and the arising correlations between them have been revealed. The dynamics of the expansion of the semantic influence of negation has been studied in detail. The structural position of negation within the universal syntactic model of the sentence has been determined. The interaction between negation and presuppositions has been established as well as some factors defining its strong or weak nature. The two-layer model of the information structure of a negative sentence has been proposed.