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UNIVERSIDAD DE HUELVA FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF NEGATION IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH. ANÁLISIS DESCRIPTIVO DE LA NEGACIÓN EN INGLÉS CONTEMPORÁNEO TRABAJO DE FIN DE GRADO CLAUDIA FERARU GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES HUELVA, SEPTIEMBRE 2016 TUTORA: BEATRIZ RODRÍGUEZ ARRIZABALAGA ABSTRACT The present work focuses on negation, a universal and complex phenomenon that entails an interrelationship of different syntactic, prosodic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. For reasons of time and space, I only deal with negation in contemporary English; specifically, with those issues that, to my view, seem to be the most problematic ones for students of English as a foreign language: among others, (i) the different kinds of negation that are available in this language; (ii) the concepts of scope and focus of negation; (iii) the forbidden phenomenon in standard English of double/multiple negation; and finally, (iv) the subsequent and necessary distinction that has, thus, to be made between assertive and nonassertive forms and contexts. This work consists of two main parts: the first one, theoretical in nature, presents a review of how these topics have been accounted for in the literature; and the second one, intended to complement the previous section, sets forth the major findings derived from the preliminary corpus-based analysis which I have carried out in a corpus of 941 negative sentences extracted manually by myself from Siri Hustvedt’s (2011) novel The Summer Without Men, which show how negation is really used in contemporary English. Key terms : negat