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全然 means "completely" in Chinese, and also in Classical Chinese. Why does 全然
only go with negative conjugations in Japanese? My teacher also says that you
cannot say とても with negative things in Japanese either.

Why is this so? I suppose when the Japanese originally borrowed 全然 it would be
used with both positive and negative things.

Aside: does the current usage of とても and 全然 reflect Japanese evolving a
negative concord system, which otherwise doesn't exist? I presume in normal
Japanese a double negative resolves to a positive?
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2013-08-29T15:58:49.677
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2013-11-03T19:58:29.527
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question
conjugations history negation
When did 全然 get restricted to the negative?
全然 began to be taught as only being followed by negatives between 1950 and
1960.

As mentioned in in the comments above, とても can actually be, and very often is,
used with negatives. And in colloquial Japanese, 全然+non-neg. is currently, and
likely always has been, frequently used.

In normal Japanese, you are correct in your presumption that double negatives
resolve to positive. ない、なくない、なくなくない、 and so on, will continue to alternate
negativity as you add more negatives to the end. However, 全然 itself does not
contain any kind of negative aspect; that still must be attached to the target
of inflection (an adjective or verb).

If I were to hazard a guess as to why 全然 became restricted to negatives, I
would say that it is likely related to the Japanese language's strongly head-
final nature. It tends to favor very long subjects and short predicates, which
means that in many cases, you can't understand an utterance until the verb
comes at the very end.

As a result, Japanese has developed a number of words like 全然 which preview
some aspect of that verb; specifically: negativity. Following is a list of
some such words:

  * 決【けっ】して
  * めったに
  * ちっとも
  * しか

These are essentially _always_ followed by a negative, and so act as nice
indicators of what will come, perhaps much later in the sentence. It seems to
me that the inverse (things only used with the positive) exists as well, but I
can't think of any examples.

There are several
[detailed](http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1333690543)
[responses](http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1374560098)
over on Yahoo's Chiebukuro that you may find interesting, as well.
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answer