Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 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 the 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
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
3 - Distributional Evidence for Two Types of ne: Redundant Negation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 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 the 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
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
Introduction
Chapter 2 argued for a distinction between two types of ne – ne1 and ne2 – on the basis of patterns of variation and change in diachronic corpus data within a model of change as morphosyntactic competition. These two types of ne have distinct distributions in corpus data and exist in different relationships to not: ne1 competes with not, and ne2 co-occurs with not. This chapter will observe a similar distinction between ne1 and ne2 in contexts of redundant or paratactic negation where ne is used independently of not. Redundant ne provides further evidence of the distinction made between ne1 and ne2 in the preceding chapter. Here, I argue that this evidence allows us to characterise more precisely the distribution – and therefore the syntax – of ne at each stage of the Jespersen Cycle.
The phenomenon of redundant negation, also called expletive negation (van der Wurff, 1999b) or paratactic negation (Jespersen, 1917) is well known and extensively described for European languages, see for example van derWouden (1994), Espinal (2000). Van derWouden (1994, 107) defines paratactic negation as follows:
…various languages and dialects show the effect that a verb (or something else) of negative import triggers a superfluous negation in a subordinate clause…(van der Wouden, 1994, 107)
An example is given in (26), inwhich paratactic negation is indicated by pn.
(26) She silly Queene forbad the boy he should not passe those grounds
She silly queen forbade the boy he should PN pass those grounds
‘She, silly Queen, forbade the boy to pass those grounds’
(1599 Shaks, Pass Pilgr. 124)
While the typical contexts for paratactic negation (PN) are well known crosslinguistically, data from two early English corpora – the York Corpus of Old English (Taylor et al., 2002) and the PPCME2 (Kroch and Taylor, 2000) – reveal contexts for PN in Middle English which are not described in the literature. They do not involve the usual triggers for PN: predicates of prohibition, fear or denial, comparatives of inequality or prepositions indicating temporal sequence. Hence they are difficult to accommodate under accounts of PN based on negative polarity item licensing (van der Wouden, 1994); on the syntactic subcategorisation of PN contexts, for example van der Wurff (1999b); or on a characterisation of PN contexts in semantic terms (Yoon, 2011).
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- Information
- Negation in Early EnglishGrammatical and Functional Change, pp. 38 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017