19.4. Never
| ʔáwə cn c hiyáʔ. | ‘I didn’t go.’ |
| ʔáwə cn kʷaʔ hiyáʔən. | ‘I never go.’ |
| ʔáwə cxʷ kʷaʔ hiyáʔəxʷ. | ‘You never go.’ |
| ʔáwə st kʷaʔ hiyáʔəɬ. | ‘We never go.’ |
| ʔáwə kʷaʔ hiyáʔəs. | ‘He/she/they never go.’ |
► 1 The first model should be very familiar. It shows the basic negative construction you learned in §9.2. Take a minute to review that construction now.
► 2 The second model illustrates the ‘never’ construction. Basically the word ʔáwə is not followed by the negative c, as in the basic negative construction, but by a subordinate clause preceded by kʷaʔ.
► 3 Clauses beginning with kʷaʔ were introduced in §17.3 and will be covered in more detail in §30.1 and §37.1. Review §17.3 to remind yourself how kʷaʔ works in ‘or’ constructions.
► 4 In clauses beginning with kʷaʔ, the following word will always have one of the subordinate subject suffixes. The subordinate subject suffixes were introduced in §13 and covered again in §17.3. The table below compares the main clause subject to the subordinate subjects:
| Main subject | Subordinate subject suffix | ||
| first-person (sing.) | ‘I’ | cn | -ən |
| first-person (pl.) | ‘we’ | st | -əɬ |
| second-person | ‘you’ | cxʷ | -əxʷ |
| third-person | ‘he/she/it’ | -s / ∅ | -əs |
► 5 In the ‘never’ construction, the first word is always ʔáwə followed by the intransitive main clause subject. There may also be other speech act particles, such as past or future (§2) or the second-person pluralizer hay (§1) following the ʔáwə. Then, after that, the negated clause follows, which is a subordinate clause beginning with kʷaʔ.
► 6 The one unusual requirement about this construction is that the subject has to be stated twice—once in the main clause, and again in the subordinate clause. Study the models and you will see that in each case of the sentences translated with ‘never,’ the subject is marked twice (except, of course, for the last one, since the intransitive subject is blank).
► 7 It is important to note that the two subjects (main clause and subordinate clause) must match. A sentence like the model ʔáwə cn kʷaʔ hiyáʔən is okay and meaningful, since cn and ‑ən are both first-person singular (‘I’). Something like *ʔáwə cn kʷaʔ hiyáʔəxʷ, where the main clause has the first-person subject (cn ‘I’) and the subordinate clause has the second-person subject (‑əxʷ ‘you’), is ungrammatical and makes no sense at all.
 | t̓íym kʷi. | ‘Sing, why don’t you.’ |
 | ʔáwə cn kʷaʔ t̓íymən. | ‘I never sing.’ |
| t̓íym cn ʔaʔ či ʔuʔx̣ən̓áɬ. | ‘I sing all the time.’ |
| ʔə́y̓. t̓íym či. | ‘Good. Sing!’ |