Negation in Gyeli

The northwestern Bantu language Gyeli exhibits negation features that aregenerally little discussed explicitly in the Bantu literature regarding the relationship between affirmative constructions and their negative counterparts. All clausal negation types in Gyeli are asymmetric in Miestamo’s (2005, 2007) sense. Constructional asymmetries include tone changes and changes in finiteness, while paradigmatic asymmetries mostly concern TAM neutralization; aspect marking is generally lost under negation (unless it is specifically marked in an embedded clause).The negation pattern in the present tense is distinct from other tense-mood categories in its morphological negation-marking strategy and a higher degree of asymmetries. The present tense-mood category also allows a choice between differentnegation markers that are linked to information structure and focus marking.