Negation in Highland East Cushitic

Highland East Cushitic (HEC) is a small group of five closely related languages and their dialects in Southern Ethiopia, in which not less than eight non-cognate negative morphemes are attested. In this paper I take a comparative look at the forms and functions of these negative morphemes. A HEC language has at least two negative morphemes to differentiate the negation of declarative and non-declarative verbs. Kambaata and Hadiyya, which have the greatest number of negative morphemes among the HEC languages, apply different negation strategies to declarative main verbs, imperative verbs, jussive verbs, converbs and relative verbs.