Clausal negation refers to simple negation of a full clause. The language has a different paradigm for negation from that in affirmative clauses. For example, Burmese finite verbs have various affixes indicating voice, tense, and aspect, as in <i>θwâ-dé</i> ‘go-ACT’ for ‘she goes,’ <i>θwâ-bí</i> ‘go-PERF’ for ‘she has gone,’ and <i>θwâ-mé</i> ‘go-POT’ for ‘she will go.’ However, the negative circumfix <i>ma- … -bû</i> replaces all tense, voice, and aspect markers. Therefore the sentence <i>ma-θwâ-bû</i> ‘Neg1-go-Neg2’ is ambiguous, and can mean ‘she does/did/will not go’ or ‘she has not gone’ (Miestamo 2008).

<br><br>Another example comes from a dialect of English spoken on Smith Island, Maryland. Whereas affirmative clauses with <i>be</i> have the standard distinctions for 1sg and 3sg in the past tense (<i>was</i>), all negative forms are <i>weren’t</i>, as in <i>I/you/he/she/it/we/they weren’t</i>. Thus, person distinctions are lost in the negative (past tense) paradigm (Nevins & Parrot 2007). 

<br><br><b>References</b><br>
Miestamo, Matti. 2008. Symmetric and Asymmetric Standard Negation.
In Haspelmath et al. (2008), chapter 113. Available online at <a href=â€http://wals.info/feature/113â€> http://wals.info/feature/113</a href>. <br>
Nevins, Andrew and Jeffrey K. Parrott. 2007. Variable Rules Meet Impoverishment Theory. <i>Formal Approaches to Variation. </i>Available on LingBuzz <a href="http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000522">http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000522</a href>. 





