Studia Językoznawcze

The skill of verbalizing mental processes is one of the basic competences of humans, which enables them to survive. Conveying simple and complex language messages, putting thoughts into words, articulating the needs and attitudes, abstracting and differentiating are the foundations of the social existence of an individual. By confirming, we accept reality. Negation of what was previously confirmed enables adopting a differentiated attitude. Without the skill of negation we wouldn’t be given the possibility to set boundaries of self- acceptance in a competent manner. The essence of the competence of negation makes it necessary to recognize its autonomic position among the basic statements determined by the intention of the sender of a language message. Every language user, free from verbal dysfunctions, is capable of evaluating the normativeness of a given language message. This skill is determined by a finite number of grammatical rules learned during the process of language acquisition, which determine the construction of syntactic structures. Despite the belief that the number of constructed sentences has an infinite value, it should be stated that because of the limited, although great, volume of the vocabulary of a given language that encompasses a finite number of words, the number sentences is also finite. The functional negation in Yiddish, German and Polish is realized with the use of diverse lexical-semantic exponents in the syntactic structures. Their positioning and the sentence quantification directly influences the process of semantic polarization [+]/[-] of a given utterance. This article provides a basic inventory of negation determinants and describes main types of negation distinguished according to the contribution and kind of determinants. On the basis of examples collected from the normative linguistic corpuses of the examined languages the process of semantic polarization [+]/[-] has been verified. Negation as a diverse process, used not only to construct negation or to modify the prosodic features of an utterance, constitutes an extensive research material, and the anomalies of syntactic structures pointed to in this work, as well as open questions to which answers should be sought in the further research process, prove the peculiarity of this language phenomenon.