Negation in Crow

Authors

  • Metab Mohammad Alhoody

    Department of English Language and Literature, College of Languages and Humanities, Qassim University, Buraydah 52571, Saudi Arabia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i9.10583
Received: 19 June 2025 | Revised: 9 July 2025 | Accepted: 15 July 2025 | Published Online: 9 September 2025

Abstract

The current study analyzes the syntactic structure of negation in Crow, a Siouan language spoken in southeastern Montana. Although a substantial amount of research is conducted on Crow, there has been little attention to the topic of negation. In contrast to other Siouan languages (such as Dakota, Ho-Chunk) that utilize clause-final particles or bipartite negation, this study shows that Crow has two different morphemes -ssaa and -leeta to denote negation within clause-internal structures. The realization of negative patterns in Crow is consistently systematic and highly structured which reflects both language-specific characteristics and broader typological relevance. The analysis reveals that the negative morphemes in Crow are bound within the verb complex, typically attached to the right of the verb stem and before any aspectual markers. Furthermore, the data shows that the morpheme -ssaa is the most common device used to denote negation, while -leeta is less used and primarily expresses the meaning of "not exist". This cross-linguistic analysis of negation with other Siouan languages demonstrates that the position of negative markers in Crow is maintained through different clause types including imperative, interrogative, and relativized clauses, among others. This negation system displays a unique strategy involving verbal-bound structure and provides typological insights by showing how negation in polysynthetic languages emerges from clause-internal structures.

Keywords:

Crow Language; Siouan Languages; Negation; Verbal Morphology

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How to Cite

Mohammad Alhoody, M. (2025). Negation in Crow. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(9), 433–447. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i9.10583

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 9 (September 2025): In progress

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Article

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Copyright © 2025 Metab Mohammad Alhoody

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.