 Treatments of English and other languages frequently posit negative operators whose scope is narrower than the sentence or clause. This tradition dates back to Aristotle, for whom the predicate term negation in Socrates is not-wise, affirming that the predicate not-wise holds of Socrates, yields a false statement if Socrates does not exist, while the predicate denial Socrates isn’t wise denies that the predicate wise holds of Socrates and is true if Socrates does not exist. For Jespersen (1917), the subclausal “special” negation as in Nobody came, where “the negative notion…belong[s] logically to one definite idea”, is opposed to “nexal” negation, applying to “the combination of two ideas”, typically the subject-predicate nexus. Later linguists usually follow Klima (1964) and Jackendoff (1969) in allowing for constituent negation (e.g., verb phrase negation in You can [not go]) alongside sentential negation (You cannot go), utilizing various grammatical and semantic diagnostics for distinguishing the two varieties.