Sentential negation is a linguistic process that changes a sentence from affirmative to negative. In this way, we can express in any human language that for example the object does not have a certain characteristic or identity, or that an event did not occur or did not happen in a certain way. In a negated sentence, several negation markers can be present. If they semantically cancel each other out and the linguistic expression is consequently interpreted as affirmative, this is called Double Negation, but if negative markers do not semantically cancel each other and the linguistic expression is still interpreted as negative, this is called Negative Concord. The expression of negation has many morphological and syntactic similarities in spoken languages which are also typical of sign languages. Sentential negation is expressed by negative non-manual and manual markings, in all sign languages investigated so far in the world, but despite this, we cannot claim that there is a uniform way of expressing negation. The differences concern manual marker on one hand, non-manual on the other, and most often the distribution of both. In my master's thesis, I will present the typology of negation in spoken and sign languages and the corpus-based research of sign languages. The main part presents a corpus analysis of sentential negation in Slovene Sign Language: a list of negative elements and a description of their usage. On the basis of the description I will also draw conclusions about the linguistic competency of the individual signers included in the corpus. This will be the first scientific research on Slovene sign language, which will verify the characteristics of negation that have previously been reported in individual popular publications.
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