Negation in Early English
Grammatical and Functional Change

This book presents an overview and analysis of negation in early English, using corpus data to track its development over time.

Phillip W. Wallage (Author)

9781107114296, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2017

268 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]