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Negation in Early English

Negation in Early English

Negation in Early English

Grammatical and Functional Change
Author:
Phillip W. Wallage, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Published:
June 2017
Availability:
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Format:
Adobe eBook Reader
ISBN:
9781108299985

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    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.

    • The detailed discussion of new corpus data and an empirically grounded description of changes to early English negation across a broad historical period offers a new perspective from which to view the changes in negation as they progress
    • Presents a clear methodological approach to the study of syntactic change in diachronic corpora that future research can adopt and build on
    • Integrates variationist, formal and functional approaches to change within a single analysis

    Product details

    June 2017
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9781108299985
    0 pages
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    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.
      Author
    • Phillip W. Wallage , Northumbria University, Newcastle

      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.