The study of negation has seen recent developments in various directions, which shed a new light on the problem. From all sides, that is the syntactic, the semantic and pragmatic points of view, recent proposals come to challenge the by now standard views on negation in natural languages that developed within the last two decades of linguistic study. Syntactically, the study of negation has experienced an impressive blossoming in the 1990s, with important contributions such as Pollock (1989), Laka (1990), Zanuttini (1991), Progovac (1994), Haegeman (1995). As a consequence of this, the existence of a NegP in the syntactic structure of negative sentences is by now widely accepted. On the other hand, the full measure of its syntactic import has not yet been taken. NegP hosts some "sentential negative marker", but it is not always clear what the sentential negative marker is. In the line of the Affect criteria, it is also claimed to host, overtly or covertly, n-expressions (i.e. elements that have been assumed to contribute to the negative meaning of the sentence). But here again, recent proposals (see e.g. Giannakidou 2000) have questioned the grounds on which n-expressions contribute to the negative - rather than the pure quantificational - content of the sentence.