Why Was the Earlier Egyptian Adjectival Sentence Not Negated

Summary This article proposes a novel explanation to the old problem in Egyptological linguistics of why the so-called Earlier (Old and Middle) Egyptian adjectival sentence did not have a symmetric negation or was not negated “directly”. It is argued that the absence of such a pattern derives from the two semantic principles determining the grammar of all negations in the language. Earlier Egyptian did not negate forms or constructions but meanings, and many meaning differences grammaticalised in the affirmative were collapsed together in the negative; a phenomenon termed radiality. In the affirmative domain, Earlier Egyptian differentiated grammatically between processual (verbal) and non-processual (non-verbal, i.e. adjectival sentence) predication of qualities. In the negative, the cognitively uncanonical non-processual profiling was subject to a radiality effect and hence did not receive a separate grammaticalised negation.