Negation in Early English

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-107-11429-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 268 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 504 g

Reihe: Studies in English Language

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wallage, Phillip W.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Wallage, Phillip W.
Phillip Wallage is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at Northumbria University, Newcastle. His work on syntactic change in the history of English (principally focusing on negation) has been published in journals including Lingua and English Language and Linguistics.