| Summary: | In English it is a well known fact that the negation markers not/n’t can be distinguished as belonging to two different language registers. In spoken English, an intonational analysis dealing with the height and shape of these negatives shows that « higher negation » corresponds mainly to not and lower negation mainly to n’t. But there happen to be irregularities. Not can be unstressed due to linguistic parameters (in utterances such as it’s important not to…), just as n’t can be stressed. The purpose of this paper is to account for the fact that the unit auxiliary+n’t, the reduced negation, happens to carry a contrastive accent. First, we shall study the intonational representation of n’t, both in its isolated realisation and within its contextual surrounding. This contextualised approach will then lead us to make a parallel between the phonetic environment and the linguistic message.
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