Based on two typological frameworks (Dahl, 1979 and Miestamo, 2007), I explore the various strategies used to negate declarative verbal main clauses (standard negation) in 28 languages in order to investigate the correlation between them and basic word order. The 28 languages are divided into three groups according to their basic word order as follows: 11 SOV, 10 SVO and 7 VSO. As much as possible, I have included languages from different language families and different geographical areas in order to eliminate the effect of genetic relationships and borrowings. The results suggest that negative strategies are probably morphological, where the negator is an affix, in SOV languages and frequently syntactic, where the negator is an independent morpheme, in SVO and VSO languages. I also show that symmetric negation, where no structural differences are observed between affirmatives and negatives other than the negative marker (s), is the most common type cross-linguistically.

This thesis focuses on the description of the three basic aspects of the word order in the Czech Sign Language in the contrast with the spoken Czech Language. On the basis of the empiric research the prototypical word order is described for the declarative sentences, topicalization and the order of the signs in the nominal phrase in the Czech Sign Language. The research consists of the video material recording 15 native speakers of the Czech Sign Language of various age. The results are compared with the situation in the three other sign languages - the American, British and Australian Sign Language. The part of this piece of work is a DVD containing particular excerpted examples of utterances, which the deaf signers have used in the research.