Hi everyone,
Welcome to the best German learning blog ever. Today, we’ll finally get the long awaited part two of our mini series called
The Positions of “nicht”
In part one, we learned two things; kind of the Yin and Yang of German negation:
a very nice, simple, straight-forward rule.
And an absurd sounding, pink assumption we need for the rule to work.
The rule: Nicht ALWAYS precedes what it negates. no exceptions.
The assumption: The side sentence structure is the REAL, normal German sentence structure.
Most of you probably have a hard time believing that these two things are all we need to get a grasp on the position of nicht. And that’s right. But not rules. What we need is an understanding of the core dynamic of a German sentence and we need to trust our … here it comes… intuition. Yup, intuition.
You see, the thing with the position of nicht is the same as with word order. There are several options for pretty much any given sentence. Some sound neutral, some carry special emphasis and some have so much tension that they sound wrong.
That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Where is the natural spot for nicht
(which would be what most sources call “sentence negation”) and what happens if we move it out of there.
I’m not promising you that you’ll get every single nicht right after reading this. But I am pretty sure that you’ll feel like you’ve understood what’s going on and you understand what’s going on when you see a “weird” negation.
If you haven’t read part one yet or you don’t really remember it, then please check that out first.
The position of “nicht” – Part One (MINDBLOWING)
Otherwise, you’re good to go for today.
We’ll start with a quick tangent about the underlying reality of German sentences.
Then, we’ll look at the neutral position of “nicht” in detail, and then we’ll explore what happens if we move “nicht” to the left and right of that position.
So if you’re ready, let’s hop right in!
***
In the intro I mentioned that the position of nicht has a lot to do with German word order. There’s a whole three part series on that, but we’ll go over the most important points together.
German Sentences – One Core Truth
Under the hood, a German sentence consists of two parts. The first part sets up a scene. We (usually) get a protagonist and time and location and possibly a bunch of references to stuff that’s already established in the conversation.
The second part is what is “happening” in that setting. That’s the payload so to speak, this is the bit of info that actually made us say the sentence to begin with. This includes the verb and all elements that are “defining” for it in that sentence.
Let’s look at an example. Oh and of course will use the verb at the end-structure (if you don’t know why… READ PART ONE ;).
- … ,dass ich gestern Abend zuhause einen Film geguckt habe.
- …, that I watched a movie at home last night.
Imagine this as a shot as a movie scene. The camera shows me, unkempt, in my underwear on the couch. Behind me, we can see the windows and that it is dark outside. Cut. Now the camera is behind me showing the back of my head and the screen with a scene of the movie The Notebook … erm… I mean Fast and Furious. Of course, don’t watch the Notebook in Brovember. Or any Vember for that matter.
Anyways, between those two “halves” there sometimes are one or a few elements for which it is up to interpretation whether they’re part of the main message or just tag-ons to the scenery.
So it’s actually a two side structure with a squishy center. Kind of like my body at the moment. My shoulders and my legs are well defined but the belly can lean either way, depending on my positi… anyways.
setting and references – in between stuff– the big news
Here’s an example that’ll make the whole dynamic really obvious.
- … , dass ich gestern im Zoo Maria getroffen habe. (…, that I met Maria at the zoo yesterday.)
- … , dass ich sie gestern im Zoo getroffen habe. (…, that I met her at the zoo yesterday.)
- …., dass ich dort gestern Maria getroffen habe. (…, that I met Maria there yesterday.)
Do you see how the elements bounce around depending on whether they are new or just references? As soon as something is a reference (sie, dort) it has been part of the conversation already and it moves to the left because it is not part of the “news”.
In sentence number one, the person who I am meeting is part of the main news. In the second sentence however, she has already been mentioned, so it’s just news that I met her, and possibly where. And in the last one, we learn what I did at the zoo yesterday.
Gee, it must be kind of depressing for a learner to see the crazy hopping in German while in the English translations, everything nicely stays in its slot.
But yeah, that’s roughly how word order works in German and as I said, there’s a whole series about it (link below).
What matters for us today is this three part structure:
setting up the scene – vague stuff that can belong to either side – main news
Because that is the key to the most important thing since sliced bread… wait, this idiom doesn’t fit #idiomfails. Anyway, it’s the key to …
The neutral position of “nicht”
And the neutral position of nicht is… drum roll please… right before the big news.
And everything that comes before it is automatically scenery. That makes sense if you think about it. You set up the scene because you want to tell us that something DIDN’T happen in that setting. Let’s take a few examples.
- … , dass ich gestern Abend zum ersten Mal nicht Youtube geguckt habe.
… that I didn’t watch Youtube last night for the first time. - … , dass ich gestern in der Bar nicht fünf Bier getrunken habe.
… , that I didn’t drink five beers at the bar yesterday. - …, dass Maria heute mit ihrem Hund nicht in den Park geht.
… that Maria doesn’t go to the park with her dog today.
In the first one, the story is that I did something for the first time last night, and the pay-off, the main info is that this thing was NOT watching Youtube.
In the second one, the scene is me at a bar, and I DIDN’T drink five beers. And the last one is about something Maria and her dog today and the news is that she DIDN’T go to the park with Bellyfrog Junior. Poor doggy.
Now, I’m sure you’re all wondering the same thing. And the answer is yes. The name of the dog really is Bellyfrog Junior. She named it after her grandmother, you know.
But you’re probably also wondering how the heck you as learners are supposed to know where the main message starts. Like… sure, it makes sense when I show it with colors but doing it alone.
And I know it seems like a daunting task and so far this must seem like a quite stupid way of explaining something. But please bear with me. What we’ll do now is move nicht left and right in these examples and see what happens. Don’t try to pin down rules, just take it in and see if it makes sense and sounds intuitive. I’m sure, you’ll be surprised :).
Moving “nicht” to the right
By moving nicht right from the neutral position, we’re moving it into the block that is the news. And so, we’re essentially splicing off a part of that, making it part of the scene. Because remember… everything before nicht is scenery.
Let’s go over the examples one by one.
- …, dass ich gestern Abend zum ersten Mal Youtube nicht geguckt habe.
Youtube is now part of the setup so we’re basically telling the story of what happened between me and Youtube last night for the first time. And that story is, I didn’t watch it. The sentence is grammatically fine. It’s just not a very natural one. You see, when you tell the story about something you watched, that something is usually pretty strongly connected to the verb. The two together make for the news, not just the watching. Sure, the connection between those two is not as strong as the connection between a verb and its separable prefix, but still separating the two creates quite a bit of tension and therefore focus. And that focus is hard to justify. Like… what else could I have done with Youtube, if I didn’t watch it. Maybe I read it. Or maybe I invited it to dinner. You see, having Youtube as part of the scene and then have what I did with it not be to watch is just rare.
Let’s take the next one
2. …, dass ich gestern in der Bar fünf Bier nicht getrunken habe.
Again, contrary to what textbooks and most online sources imply if you follow their rules, this is a perfectly fine sentence. It tells a story about me and a certain five beers yesterday at the bar. Maybe the bar has a wide selection of beers and I tried all except those certain five beers. Or maybe I drank up ALL the beers at the bar, except those five. The point is, the sentence doesn’t negate those beers.
But usually, when we’re telling the story about us drinking something, the drink itself is an essential part of that news broadcast. By splitting it away from the verb, we’re introducing tension and that has to be justified by some unusual message.
And while here, it is not so hard to find such a message, it is pretty much impossible for the last example.
3. …, dass Maria heute mit ihrem Hund in den Park nicht geht.
This sentence establishes Maria and her dog. AND that they are directed toward the park in some way, because that is established by the Accusative in the phrase in den Park. All that is established scene, and the only thing negated is the “gehen”. So this sentence would only makes sense if you wanted to tell us that she didn’t “go” but, I don’t know, hovered. Or teleported.
Generally, the destination is VERY strongly connected to verbs of motion and splitting it away creates an extreme amount of tension. So most of the time people will call it “wrong” because the tension and focus is not justified.
Cool.
So, what have we seen so far? When we move nicht to the right from the neutral position, into the chunk that makes up the news, we’re creating quite a bit of tension because we’re splitting up what naturally (I dare say “intuitively”) belongs together. And depending how strong that bond is, this can just suggest a special message (the beer example) or it can sound wrong. Like for a verb and its prefix for instance…
- … , dass die Tür auf nicht geht.
This is not really wrong, but it is SUPER weird. Or art, if a poet does it.
Anyway, let’s direct our attention in the other direction and move nicht left.
Moving “nicht” to the left
Remember that we learned that some sentences have these undefined elements in the center? These elements that can be either scene or main message, no one knows or cares? Well, if we have one of those elements and we move nicht left, past it, then this element becomes part of the main message.
Let’s look at our park example, because there, we do have such an element, as we can see in the non negated version
- … , dass Maria heute mit ihrem Hund in den Park geht.
We can understand the sentence as telling us what she does (“going to the park with her dog“) or we can understand it as telling us what she does with her dog (“go to the park“). It doesn’t really make a difference information-wise. And so it doesn’t really make a difference which version we’re negating, or in other words, it doesn’t matter whether nicht is before or after the dog.
3. …, dass Maria heute mit ihrem Hund nicht in den Park geht.
…, dass Maria heute nicht mit ihrem Hund in den Park geht.
BOTH version sound neutral. Now some of you are probably like “But Emanuel, isn’t the second version what is called element negation? Like… we’re negating the dog part specifically?”
But the answer is no. This is NOT element negation because there isn’t enough tension, and thus not enough focus on one element. That’s a good example why this whole sentence negation vs. element negation stuff isn’t really all that great, IMO.
If we wanted to put focus on the dog-part, we’d have to do that using our voice. Or red caps. Like Trump.
3. … , dass Maria heute nicht MIT IHREM HUND in den Park geht (sondern mit ihrer Kuh).
So, if we have one or several unclear elements then the position of nicht doesn’t really matter in that area. But as soon as we move it into what is clearly the scene, THAT’S when we create focus.
2. … , dass ich gestern nicht in der Bar fünf Bier getrunken habe.
Technically, we could interpret the whole part after nicht as the news. But the fact that there’s a number (five) suggests that THE AMOUNT is our story, and the location where it takes place is part of the scene. If we take out the number then the bar becomes more newsworthy… like… “drinking beer at the bar”… that’s a nice description for an evening activity.
Anyway, by moving nicht in front of the bar-part in the original example, we’re creating a focus on this element. Because it was part of the scene. And whenever we have nicht in front of an element of the scene, we create so much focus that this element specifically is now the target of the negation, making THIS negation the main point of the sentence. While the rest kind of becomes scene.
Here it is again with color:
2 … , dass ich gestern nicht in der Bar fünf Bier getrunken habe.
I did drink five beers yesterday, I just didn’t do it at the bar. And
Now, in this example, nicht isn’t THAT far from the neutral position yet. So it doesn’t create crazy tension. That’s why usually native speakers would give the bar a little extra nudge through aural emphasis. But the further you move nicht to the left, the stronger the tension and the more clear the focus on that single element.
2 …., dass ich nicht gestern in der Bar fünf Bier getrunken habe.
I did drink five beers at the bar. But it wasn’t yesterday.
Cool.
Now, for completion, let’s also move nicht to the left in the Youtube example…
- … , dass ich heute nicht zum ersten Mal Youtube geguckt habe.
This sentence is a tricky one. Technically, we could see the whole chunk after nicht, watching Youtube for the first time, as the news. That’s what I didn’t do today. Maybe I did it years ago, maybe I haven’t done it yet -#youtubevirgin.
But the more natural way, is to consider for the first time as part of the scene. So without the negation, the sentence would tell us what I did today for the first time…. watching Youtube. The neutral position for nicht would be before Youtube then, and so by putting nicht in front of for the first time, we’ve moved it into scene-land. And that creates tension and special focus on the first time. That’s what’s being negated now, but I did watch Youtube before.
Cool, now, let’s do a little recap.
Each sentence consists of a setup, usually the protagonist, references to stuff that has been part of the conversation and time and place, followed by the news. That news can be just a verb or a verb and its object or a longer chunk. It’s different from sentence to sentence and really the only way to approach this of it is by using … common sense. The neutral position of nicht is right before the news. And if we move it away from there, we’re creating tension that might lead to one specific element becoming the focus of the negation or … to a sentence that sounds weird or wrong.
And that’s basically it.
I know you’re now all like “EMANUEL, are you for real?!?! That’s your explanation? We have a gazillion questions!!!”
But as far as fundamentals go, there isn’t really much more to explain. All we can do now is look at examples. And that’s what we’ll do in the third part of this series – a big, fat exercise, to be published in about three years.
Nah, kidding. I won’t make you wait that long this time :).
But for today, we’ve done enough.
Don’t stress out if you walk away from this not feeling like “Yeah, I got all the rules.”. There are no real rules. That’s one take-away. And the other is this dynamic of neutral position and moving nicht away from it. If you feel like you’ve understood this as a concept, then perfect!
But of course that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have questions. I’m pretty sure you do, so please let me know ALL of them in the comments. That’ll help me make the exercise more on point, so to speak. And also, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Was it what you expected (probably not ;)? Did that make sense to you? Do you think, with a little bit of practice, it can make you feel “safe” in the world of negation? As most importantly… WAS IT LIT??
Let me know all your feedback and criticism in the comments, bros.
I’m out for now… erm… keep dabbin’ on ‘dem textbooks, have a great week and see you next time.
If you want to practice, you can find the exercise right here:
great article, loved it! explanations are really good as usual :) I feel more confident now, thanks a lot!
Happy to hear that :)
So, in example #3, if we change out Maria for “her”, would the sentence become… Dass ich dort sie gestern getroffen habe.?
The default is:
– …, dass ich sie dort gestern getroffen habe.
So “she” goes all the way to the front.
dass ich gestern in der Bar fünf Bier nicht getrunken habe
So this couldn’t mean that you drunk 4 or 6 beers right?
That would be
dass ich gestern in der Bar nicht fünf Bier getrunken habe
?
Yup, the original technically means that there five beers that you didn’t drink, not saying anything about what you did drink.
cool thanks
Does the ‘scenery’ vs ‘main news’ idea help explain the (neutral) order of direct and indirect objects in the sentence? The rules I’ve seen elsewhere (indirect/dative first if both are nouns, pronoun first if the other is a noun, if both are pronouns, direct/accusative first). Perhaps you’ve already covered this – if not, do you have one of your super ‘more intuitive’ explanations? I can see that ‘scenery first, then main news’ explains pronouns before nouns, but why opposite order for 2 nouns vs 2 pronouns?
Well, the “rule” isn’t all that clear if you look closely.
– Ich gebe das Buch meiner Mutter…. correct
– Ich gebe ein Buch meiner Mutter…. weird
– Ich gebe ein Buch einer Frau und eins einem Mann… correct
– Ich gebe das Buch der Frau…. correct, emphasis on Frau
– Ich gebe der Frau das Buch… correct, neutral
You have the same dynamic at work here, with “known” items (direct article) coming before “new nouns” (indirect article).
For most verbs that take two objects, the “Accusative” object is inherently linked “more tightly”, in that you cannot really skip it, while you may skip the dative object at times.
So, as it’s more connected to the verb, more defining, it tends to come later, more toward the end. But as you can see in my examples, it’s highly dependent on the PRECISE context.
The only thing that’s quite solid is that “es” as a pronoun tends to come early. But other Accusative pronouns may not.
– Ich stelle ihr ihn vor… works
– ich stelle ihn ihr vor… better
I’d recommend reading my 3 part series on word order. It does need a do-over but I go into this quite thoroughly.
Hope that helps!
Vielen Dank! Ich hatte vor einigen Monaten die drei Artikel gelesen, aber einige Elemente vergessen. Deine Erklärungen sind echt super.
dass ich gestern Abend zum ersten Mal Youtube nicht geguckt habe.
My question is: shouldn’t i put (kein) instead of (nicht), because YouTube is a noun, soooo?….
Great question!
In spoken German, people actually do say “kein Youtube” or “kein Fernsehen” as well.
But generally, “Youtube gucken” is considered a phrasal verb. A bit like a prefix verb, but not as closely attached.
And so you negate it like a verb.
The border is blurry.
The second one is more common, but the first one works as well, because “Bier trinken” is just pretty much a hobby for some people.
Oomf, and I thought I knew German grammar well!
After reading these two articles on nicht I feel like my whole life before this was a lie, my head is spinning, palms are sweaty, I now look at my nicht-sentences and all I see is…
So, Emmanuel, here’s a VIP[very intelligent person]-question for you: can we say that the positioning of nicht is defined by what is called Thema and Rhema?
YES!!!
If you know what Thema and Rhema is then you have the key to German word order pretty much.
Rhema goes right with the verb final, Thema goes left. In between sit particles like “doch” and so on and it’s also the place for the default negation and for words like “gern”.
Awesome, thanks! :p
Hello Emanuel,
I had a few questions here:
What is the difference between the “scene” and the “in between stuff” of the sentence or more like, how do you spot the difference between those two, because to me it just seems like all of it should belong to the “scene”.
Also I just wanted to make sure I understood correctly about the moving of nicht:
If nicht is moved to the right, it’s usually going to create more tension (emphasis) on the other moved word, e.g:
or it’s going to create to much tension that it just sounds wrong, e.g:
If nicht is moved to the left, it’s usually going to create a little tension, e.g:
or create a bit more tension, therefore emphasis on the preceding unit, e.g:
I kinda tried making my own examples, but don’t really know if they’re fitting. Please let me know what you think.
So the “in between” stuff is in linguistics all those adverbs like “doch, mal, schon” and so on. They always sit between the scene and the payoff.
But please, you need to think of this as vague, blurry edges. The more you try to pin it down, the more you’ll be confused. It’s a shape you can only “see” when you “squint”, if that makes sense. So details disappear.
As for the emphasis… no, just because an element moved left doesn’t mean it gets emphasis. You’re moving “nicht” here, so that and the negated part after it is what’ll get emphasis from the tension.
In your first example, the pizza became part of the scene, so it sounds like it was established before, but no emphasis there. Actually less, because now it’s in a position of a boring recall. The emphasis on entirely on “gekocht” because you decided to negate JUST that.
For the milk example, “mit ihrer Freundin” is pretty neutral so you can add it to “scene” (nicht after it) or add it to payload (nicht before it), and nothing really changes about the feel of the phrase.
But if you move nicht before “gestern nachmittag” which definitely is part of the scene, then that gets emphasis, yes.
I guess, to add to what I wrote initially in this comment – the element that gets emphasis when tension arises from moving nicht around is the element after nicht. Not the stuff before it.
I hope that helps.
Also, please don’t look at the emphasis as a linear function. It depends on what elements are in what context. Sometime, moving “nicht” one step left changes nothing, sometimes it makes everything sound wrong. It’s not really always gradual.
Ah, I kinda get what you’re saying. So bassically it’s not about in what direction you move “nicht”, it’s in what position you place it.
Ah, I kinda get what you’re saying. So bassically it’s not about in what direction you move “nicht”, it’s in what position you place it.
Ah, I kinda get what you’re saying. So bassically it’s not about in what direction you move “nicht”, it’s in what position you place it.
In English is possible to have a negated verb (the act of not doing something) in a “multi-verb structure” e.g.
“…, that I want to *not watch* youtube.” and
“…, that I have today *not watched* youtube”
Vs
“…, that I want not to watch youtube” or
“…, that I don’t want to watch youtube” and
“…, that I have not today watched youtube”
So, having a way for “not watching”. How is it possible to translate this into German if nicht can’t move into the verb slot? I assume these would be wrong
“…, dass ich youtube will nicht gucken.”
“…, dass ich heute YouTube habe nicht geguckt”
You can’t replicate these things in German, and yes, the German examples you gave do not work. Not only because of nicht but because you have changed the order of verbs at the end.
What you could do is something like this:
But I’m not sure for all the examples, what they actually express in English.
Oops, of course I have the verbs the wrong way, entschuldigen.
Perhaps a clearer example in English is with to be allowed:
“I am not allowed to watch youtube” vs
“I am allowed to not watch youtube”.
The second one would be if everyone was expected to watch youtube, but I didn’t have to.
So, in English the “not” can mean “not the act of doing”, or “the act of not doing”. Perhaps German wouldn’t use nicht for that?
e.g. “to not watch” would mean to deliberately not watch, and is almost a verb in its own right.
This is an interesting example.
Technically, this could be read in two ways:
1) I have permission to not watch youtube
2) I don’t have permission to watch youtube
But most people would hear it as number 2).
So if number one is what you want to express, you’d have to rephrase it:
The German word order gets in the way of doing what English does here.
Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m asking. Thanks
When you use inversion, you can distinguish the two.
Even though, both sound somewhat weird.
Yes, that separates them indeed.
Hello Emanuel, nice post, as always.
But I did got one question, about the examples you gave in the first post about nicht position
I think I got why the second one of the second example is wrong. Since we use “ihn”, the element was already established and so it is part of the scenery now (right?).
But for the first example, I can’t see how only changing the verb could have such a difference.
The crucial point here is that the location is SUPER connected with the verb “to be”.
They’re almost one unit… to be somewhere.
So when you put “nicht” after it, you split this unit in two parts and that sounds super weird.
If we replace “im Zoo” with a pronoun then things shift a little.
The second one sounds better, but the first one doesn’t sound as off as the version with “im Zoo” because now we have the pronoun-left-force at work.
German word order really is an interplay of a bunch of forces pulling elements in a certain direction.
I hope that helps.
This topic has gone wooooshing right over my head. I am very new to learning German. I am certain, if I continue, it will sink in.
Thomas, this is the most wonderful service you do. I have dabbled in learning German since living in Germany 1997 and 1998, but the classes and books seam boring. Your work is a delight.
Glad you enjoy it, even though some of the stuff is too advanced at the moment :).
I don’t understand why sentence #3 is wrong: “in den Park nicht geht” makes sense to me. She didn’t go to the park.
After doing the exercise, is it because it splits apart the location and the act of going?
Yes, that’s exactly it. “gehen” and the location you go to are so tightly connected that it creates tension to put them apart.
It only makes sense if you want to specifically emphasize “GO” as opposed to “drive” for example.
When I read your word order series, I understand that if I want to put emphasis on certain info to the end of the sentence.
Nicht puts emphasis on the info it precedes while it can be in the middle or to the left side of the sentence.
Actually I am struggling a bit to combine these two knowledges. Do you think these two set of sentences below carry the same emphasis and meaning or they are different?
or
Thank you very much.
Let me try to clear it up.
Emphasis is a result of tension, and tension is a result of deviating from the norm.
You don’t create emphasis by moving something to the end. You create emphasis /tension by moving something to the end, that wouldn’t naturally go there.
With “nicht” it’s the same. If you put it in front of something where you wouldn’t expect it by default, THEN it creates emphasis for that element.
About the sentences:
The second version of the first one sounds quite weird (high tension) because you moved park away from “gehen”, even though place is way more relevant for “gehen” than “with whom” (her dog). The tension there is so high, and there is so much emphasis on the dog that it sounds wrong, unless you have a really compelling reason why you would stress that so much.
The second pair is similar in that you’re moving “beer” away from “trinken”, thereby creating a lot of tension, because the drink is more relevant to the verb “trinken” than the location.
Here, the second version sounds like you want to contrast five beers at the bar vs 5 beers somewhere else.
And you made “5 beers” part of the established scenery, so it sounds like you mentioned that before.
Let me know if that helps.
That helps a lot. Thanks Emanuel.
I started looking into German grammar a few days ago but I’ve been reading German novels for the last two months or so. My first reaction was “well I didn’t know all this stuff about “der/die/das” and whatnot but I wasn’t doing so bad”. Your articles are by far more useful than any German textbook I’ve picked up.
This is going to be quite a long comment, it’s just I think I got the concept but I’m not so sure about its application.
Please, correct me if I’m wrong (most of it is speculation on my part)
1- (that) Thomas didn’t WATCH Youtube today for the first time.
(not always wrong but I have to create an insanely convoluted scenario to make it work, something like “Thomas started working for Google and so he didn’t watch Youtube because he was actually busy writing the algorithm for Youtube”)
2- (that) Thomas didn’t watch Youtube TODAY for the first time.
(because Thomas started watching Youtube a month ago so today was not the first time; it was actually 30 days ago.)
3- (that) Thomas didn’t watch Youtube today for the FIRST time.
(implying that it’s his second or third or 76986th time watching Youtube)
4- (that) Thomas didn’t watch Youtube today for the first time.
(there isn’t any part of the sentence that gets more emphasis)
5- (that) Thomas didn’t watch YOUTUBE today for the first time
(maybe today was the first time he watched Netflix)
On the other hand if I changed entirely the meaning of the sentence:
1-(that) today, for the first time, Thomas didn’t watch Youtube.
2-(that) today, not for the first time, Thomas watched Youtube.
But
are wrong.
One general remark first: you ended all examples with “habe” but it I think you don’t need an explanation for that :).
Also, I will mostly talk about the German and your explanation, and not so much about the English translation, because that would be a discussion about English and how to emphasize stuff there.
1) … it sounds like you’re singling out “gucken” in order to contrast it with something else. You suggest “working on youtube’s code” but the objects don’t match up. Youtube vs Youtube’s code.
For a contrast like this, the object of both actions needs to be Youtube and it also should have the same grammatical role. So it’s not so good to jump from a direct object (Youtube gucken) to a prepositional object (an Youtube arbeiten).
2) Yes, having the “nicht” before “heute” suggests that this is what you specifically want to negate.
In spoken German, you’d usually add an oral emphasis to “heute” to “confirm” the stress.
3) Yup, that’s what that means.
4) Yup, that’s the most generic version. It’s commonly understood as Thomas usually watching Youtube everyday, but NOT today.
5) The Oral stress on Youtube is the only thing different to version three, and the effect is exactly as you predicted :)
1b) This little switch doesn’t really change that much to me. It sounds like the speaker glitched for a split second and forgot to say “heute” early enough.
The first one that you called wrong is indeed incredibly weird. It makes no sense to me and i can’t think of a context in which that would fit, so calling it wrong is fair.
The second one, however, is fine. Just a little glitchy like 1b)
Hope that helps :)
That was really helpful. Thanks!
At this stage in my German I can’t tell if your explanations are actually fully correct or not, but I must say that your notion of “the scenery” and “the payload” is quite beautiful in their application to sentence meaning and structure. THIS IS WHY some of us love learning languages (our own or other ones): somehow language REALLY IS the model of “our world/our existence/our Gestalt”. Thanks so much for this beautiful writing.
Glad to hear that it was inspiring :). You might also like the series on word order. It’s the same concept, essentially.
That series is a little older though, and probably needs a good trimming and edit :D.
Dankeschön. Reading your article, one idea that came to mind was using “but” to identify the location of “nicht”. E.g I have read the article BUT not recently. = Ich habe den Artikel nicht neulich gelesen. So in English, cramming all the positive stuff before BUT NOT should result in the same position of “not”. I’m sort of paraphrasing your ideas in my own way. Does it seem reliable to you? Michael
I see what you mean, but I feel like it’ll fail in many important instances.
– I wasn’t at the zoo yesterday.
– Ich war gestern nicht im Zoo.
Here, I don’t really know how to apply the but-test, and I’m sure I can come up with plenty of other examples.
What do you think?
you are the best in explaining this Zeug, keep it up and make your guide.
I will buy it whenever its available, check up A Guide to Japanese Grammar by Tae Kim. Maybe it can give you ideas on how to set up the guide, it has your same approach but with less funny (and also let say… neutral) jokes.
:)
Thank you, Emanuel, for this great and of course FUN article on “the position of nicht”. Absolutely loved it.
The only question I have for now (and I’m not saying I’m all enlightened about the subject, No! I’m still f*cking confused because I need to see this in action by practicing more) is that you explained all this cool stuff by making that absurd sounding, pink pre-assumption of yours.
But we all know that in reality, not all sentences are side sentences (or in our case, “natural” sentences). Many sentences have got their verbs in the second position whether it is natural or not. So, how can we split those sentences into “scenery” and “the big news” and ultimately find the correct position for “nicht”?
Thank you again, and I’m waiting for your “enlightening” answer ;)
Hmmm, have you read part one of this? I go more into detail about the pink pre-assumption there :).
“nicht” will NEVER come before position two, but it can come before position one, because then it just negates that box.
Also, have you read my series on Word Order?
The assumption is what linguists do when they analyse German structure, because the true structure is the side sentence. The main sentence is a modification of that.
Does that help :)?
Well, I have read the first part (but not the series on word order). And the overall conclusion that I made after reading these two parts, is that “nicht” always negates the big news in a neutral sentence (unless we really want to put a special focus on another part of it) and I understand that and am totally OK with it.
But what I’m questioning here is actually two things:
1. Do we always have to break the sentences into “scenery” and “main news” when we’re trying to find the correct position for “nicht”?
2. If so, how should we break the main sentences (the ones which have the verb in their second position) into these parts and then find the correct position for “nicht” accordingly?
Hi Emanuel
Duolingo is telling me the following is the correct word order:
Er mag seinen eigenen Bruder nicht
when I tried to say:
Er mag nicht seinen eigenen Bruder
Am I missing something?
A “moderator” on that site (I dont know what that means) provided the following explanation:
“Because that is not the way you negate sentences in German. The “nicht” usually goes to the end of the sentence (but still in front of any infinitives and/or participles that might be there already).
Only in very specific contexts, when you want to negate parts of the sentence, the “nicht” can stand directly in front of these parts. But this is not the case here.”
Given that kein = nicht+ein, and therefore always comes before the object, I dont understand this explanation.
cheers!
Okay, I have to be blunt here: that moderator clearly does not know what he or she is talking about. Seriously, it’s just a regurgitation of stuff they read somewhere written by other people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
The position of nicht is just not that simple. If it were, it wouldn’t be such an issue for learners.
Now, as for your question… the sentence tell us something about the dynamic between him and his brother, so those two are protagonists in a way. The “act” that is negated is “mögen”.
Or in other words… the sentence tells us something about what he does to his brother, while your version technically answers “What does he do?” “Not liking his brother”.
Does that help?
Perfect. Your explanations are always so helpful, and make me feel at ease when I think I am going insane.
Why the moderator doesn’t know what he is talking about? From your post I understood that the moderator is right, but the rule is just more complicated abd better than yours.
Well, if you make a statistic about how many negated sentences end with “nicht” vs. those that don’t you’ll see that the second group is much bigger. So saying that “nicht usually goes to the end”, as the moderator did, is giving people a wrong impression. Sure, the person then adds a bunch of hedging statements but it’s obvious that it’s not based on deep understanding of negation in German.
Hi Emanuel
Thanks for your entire website, and in particular this explanation of nicht.
My question is, when moving from the side sentence to a main sentence formation, what happens to nicht if the “news” (or part of it) is in the Box 1 position? (or, for example, if you were answering a question with only a phrase rather than a full sentence – can you start with nicht?)
cheers, Paul
Oh, great question!!
So, if the nicht is in its neutral position and you’re saying a full sentence, then the nicht will stay in its place.
Let’s take this sentence:
– Ich gehe heute nicht in den Park.
And now let’s move the main news to the front.
– In den Park gehe ich heute nicht.
– Nicht in den Park gehe ich heute.
Only the first version sounds idiomatic, while the second one puts specific focus on “to the park” while leaving the gehen in the affirmative.
So it sounds like
– It’s not the park I am going to today.
However, if you’re using just a phrase to answer a question, then the nicht goes in the front, if you want to negate it. That’s because such a phrase is always just “one element”
– “Wo gehst du heute hin?”
“Nicht in den Park.”
hope that made sense :)
Vielen Dank
Your posts are so enjoyable. Total addictive substance for my brains .