Negation in early English : grammatical and functional change

Bibliographic Information

Negation in early English : grammatical and functional change

Phillip W. Wallage

(Studies in English language)

Cambridge University Press, 2017

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-216) and indexes

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Informed by detailed analysis of data from large-scale diachronic corpora, this book is a comprehensive account of changes to the expression of negation in English. Its methodological approach brings together up-to-date techniques from corpus linguistics and minimalist syntactic analysis to identify and characterise a series of interrelated changes affecting negation during the period 800-1700. Phillip Wallage uses cutting-edge statistical techniques and large-scale corpora to model changes in English negation over a period of nine hundred years. These models provide crucial empirical evidence which reveals the specific processes of syntactic and functional change affecting early English negation, and identifies diachronic relationships between these processes.

Table of Contents

  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Quantitative evidence for a model of the Jespersen Cycle in Middle English
  • 3. Distributional evidence for two types of ne: redundant negation
  • 4. Distributional evidence for different types of 'not'
  • 5. The syntax of early English Jespersen Cycle: a morphosyntactic feature-based account
  • 6. The role of functional change in the Jespersen Cycle
  • 7. Negative concord in Early English
  • 8. Negative inversion: evidence for a quantifier cycle in early English
  • 9. The loss of negative concord: interaction between the quantifier cycle and the Jespersen Cycle
  • 10. Conclusion.

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