「道歩いてんのに人影がまったくね..」
In the manga, the quoted sentence above is shown with an image of deserted road, and I guess the meaning should be something like this:
「I'm walking down the road, but not a single person in sight.. 」
But without the picture, I would have mistaken it as:
「I'm walking down the road, but so many people in sight.. 」
Please help me understand the grammar of the sentence, because to me it seems like a positive sentence.
This is because まったく is a negative polarity item that implies (い)ない even without saying it explicitly. The Japanese language has many such phrases.
Unlike English, Japanese is verb-final, and negation usually comes toward the end of a sentence. Many Japanese NPIs appear early, and they're often signals that a negative predicate is coming up:
In many cases, this signal is strong enough that you can leave out the actual part of the predicate containing the negation (as long as it can be inferred from context):
8a. ちっとも変わらない。
8b. ちっとも。
So you can say something like this:
「寿司は好き？」「まったく。」
"Do you like sushi?" "Not at all".
This ね after まったく is just a filler meaning nothing in particular.
The ね in this sentence context is the short form of ない, and 全く means "at all, completely", so 全くね means "completely nothing" or "not a single thing there".
