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"The action itself is placed in an infinitive form" is not quite true in Finnish... The form depends on the tense and mood, as you can see in these examples. --Mikko Silvonen 14:26, 30 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article needs serious copy editing so that it includes all forms of the negative verb in the F-U languages; for example, the North Sámi example makes no mention whatsoever of the supinum form of the negative verb. -Yupik 09:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

19 years later, this still seems true. The main introduction of the article contains several weaknesses:

• There is no concise definition of what constitutes a negative verb
• There is no example of a negative verb in use
• It is apparently cites work largely from a single author, Matthew Dryer, with a mostly irrelevant comment about Miestamo 2008 at the end. However, the first citation isn't even to Dryer himself but a review article of the entire WALS by another author, and the second citation to Dryer does not seem to mention negative verbs at all.
• The summary is not particularly concise or clear.

I suspect part of what's happening in the rest of the article stems from a confusion of terminology. I would think that we are talking about things like Finnish e-, which conjugates for tense and displays agreement morphology. For example, I can see how somebody would think that the alternation between ある aru vs. ない nai in Japanese might count (i.e., if nai really is the negative form of aru, I can see why somebody would think that a negative verb form counts as a negative verb). Non-scholarly sources on the internet also seem to use the term "negative verb" to mean any verb + not when describing English grammar. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

They explain negation, not specifically negative verbs. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 10:05, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Is the Japanese 〜ない somehow a 'negative verb', as described by the article's lead section?

I don't think the non-Uralic languages described match the definition at all. --88.113.162.167 (talk) 21:37, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A quick Google search yields several sources for learners with explanations and conjugation tables that say that ない nai is the negative form of ある aru. This matches the (non-scholarly) citation currently given in the article, but I agree with the previous comment that this does not match the definition of negative verb, since nai does not appear to be an independent verb but a potentially suppletive form of another one. ない nai is a negative suffix elsewhere in the language, but as far as I'm aware it is usually described as a suffix, not a verb. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article needs some examples of negative verbs in action accompagnied with glosses. 2003:E6:9743:21FB:805A:B122:4D52:2111 (talk) 11:55, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The section on negation in English is, at best, misleading, but is in many ways incorrect. There are no citations to work, scholarly or otherwise, and it makes a number of unsupported assumptions and assertions. There are multiple assumptions that are either ad hoc or incorrect:

• "The verbal negation predicate is 'not'." – It's not clear what predicate means here (though I think the person who wrote this means "verb"). As far as I am aware, not is not typically described as a predicate in research on English negation.
• "In English, a standard negation (SN) is used to negate declarative main clauses. The verbal negation predicate is 'not'. To negate other clauses, the negation construction differs from SN." – This is simply false.
  • Both main and subordinate clauses are also negated with not in English.
  • Interrogative clauses and imperative statements are negated with not, not just declarative sentences.
• "The English auxiliary 'do', in combination with the negative verb, indicates whether one or multiple individuals are involved" – Is not meant to be the negative verb here?
  • There are no citations for the claim that not is a verb; I'm aware of no scholarly work that makes such a claim.

I think this entire section bears removal. Nlacara (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]