A Man of Measure Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson, pp. 345–356

From an information-theoretic viewpoint, the complexity of a phenomenon can be defined in terms of the length of the description it requires. With this background, grammatical complexity may be approached using as criteria the number of grammaticalized distinctions in a functional domain and the extent to which the expression of these distinctions conforms to the one-meaning-one-form principle. The standard negation structures found in the world’s languages may be divided into two basic types, symmetric and asymmetric negation, according to whether or not there are structural differences between affirmatives and negatives in addition to the presence of negative markers. According to the proposed criteria of complexity, asymmetric negation under its different manifestations is generally more complex than symmetric negation. 1