How do we handle this – do we move the negation to the verb, and make it "There are not signs of disease"? While this could work, what about
There will be sunny skies and no rain.
No-one came to the party.
There will be zero rain tomorrow.
It may be better to operate on the count of the noun, or where the noun stands for a relation, build it and put the negation on that relation.
Rain is an aggregate noun, so the count is a real number, and has a unit of say millimetres. Then "no rain" becomes a count of zero.
Testing shows no indication of anaemia.
Testing shows a slight indication of anaemia.
Here, "no" is at one end of a range which includes "slight" and "strong", as in
Anaemia is strongly indicated.
There are slight indications of anaemia.
There are possible indications of anaemia.
There is no indication of anaemia.
We could collapse the third form into a similar form to the first, but we can’t do that when we have "testing shows no indication of…." It is probably better to build the relation, and negate it, as
Is the negation a logical or an existential one? "possible indications" only gets the existential pin into possible territory, but not True. Still, it is an example where a seeming spectrum switches from logical to existential.
During searching, we have to be able to match this to
Nothing to indicate anaemia was found.
That is, Nothing as a subject of a relation is the same as a negated relation (it doesn’t always work – "nothing stings like a bee").
Put the long way around, the author of the document reports that an unspecified (but presumably competent) person found nothing which would indicate the presence of anaemia to that person.
People use "signs" interchangeably with "indications", so we should make "sign" a noun form of ToSignal, which has the same TransClausal form as ToIndicate
It indicates to me that there is a problem.
It signals to me that there is a problem.
We found signs of a problem.