Negation in Crow

The current study analyzes the syntactic structure of negation in Crow, a Siouan language spoken in southeastern Montana. Although a substantial amount of research is conducted on Crow, there has been little attention to the topic of negation. In contrast to other Siouan languages (such as Dakota, Ho-Chunk) that utilize clause-final particles or bipartite negation, this study shows that Crow has two different morphemes -ssaa and -leeta to denote negation within clause-internal structures. The realization of negative patterns in Crow is consistently systematic and highly structured which reflects both language-specific characteristics and broader typological relevance. The analysis reveals that the negative morphemes in Crow are bound within the verb complex, typically attached to the right of the verb stem and before any aspectual markers. Furthermore, the data shows that the morpheme -ssaa is the most common device used to denote negation, while -leeta is less used and primarily expresses the meaning of "not exist". This cross-linguistic analysis of negation with other Siouan languages demonstrates that the position of negative markers in Crow is maintained through different clause types including imperative, interrogative, and relativized clauses, among others. This negation system displays a unique strategy involving verbal-bound structure and provides typological insights by showing how negation in polysynthetic languages emerges from clause-internal structures.