Aspects of discontinuous negation in Santome

This paper provides an overview of the expression of negation in Santome, one of the four Portuguese-based creole languages spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, focusing especially on its standard discontinuous sentence negation pattern. It will be shown that the distribution of the final negation marker is strongly related to complementation and adjunction, thereby providing evidence for the syntactic position of the negation markers in the clause. Other topics addressed are the negation cycle in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, negative concord and minimizers, and negative coordination.