The Loss Of Negative Concord In Standard English

Author : Amel Kallel
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443828157
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Loss of Negative Concord in Standard English written by Amel Kallel and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The loss of Negative Concord (NC) has long been attributed to external factors. This study readdresses this issue and provides evidence of the failure of certain external factors to account for the observed decline and ultimate disappearance of NC in Standard English. A detailed study of negation in Late Middle and Early Modern English reveals that the process of the decline of NC was a case of a natural change, preceded by a period of variation manifested in the obtained S-curves for all the contexts studied. Variation existed not only on the level of the speech community as a whole but also within individual speakers (contra Lightfoot, 1991). A close study of n-indefinites in negative contexts and their ultimate replacement with Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in a number of grammatical environments shows that the decline of NC follows the same pattern across contexts in a form of parallel curvature, which indicates that the loss of NC is a natural process. However, this study reveals that the decline is not constant across time and thus the Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch, 1989) does not, in that respect, fully account for this change. Context behaviour suggests an alternative principle of linguistic change, the Context Constancy Principle. A Context Constancy Effect is obtained across all contexts indicating that the loss of NC is triggered by a change in a single underlying parameter setting. Accordingly, a theory-internal explanation is suggested. N-words underwent a lexical reanalysis whereby they acquired a new grammatical feature [+Neg] and were thus reinterpreted as negative quantifiers, rather than NPIs. This lexical reanalysis was triggered by the ambiguous status of n-words between [±Neg] and thus between single and double negative meanings. This change is treated as a case of parameter resetting as this lexical reanalysis affected a whole set of lexical items and can thus economically account for the different observed surface changes.

Author : Brian Lowrey
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443884421
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change written by Brian Lowrey and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprises a series of studies by a number of scholars working on what might broadly be termed the “medieval” period of the history of English, focusing on Old English, Middle English, and the relatively less well-documented period of transition from the former to the latter. The volume brings together contributions not only from a variety of fields, ranging from semantics and syntax to prosody and phonology, but also from different theoretical standpoints, in order to improve the reader’s understanding of the rapid changes that affect the language at this time. The collection of papers here should be of interest to all scholars and students working on Old or Middle English, as well as to students of historical linguistics in general, given that many of the processes and methodological parameters described here will prove to be directly applicable to the study of other periods and of other languages.

Author : Amel Kallel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lexical Reanalysis of N-words and the Loss of Negative Concord in Standard English written by Amel Kallel and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027269882
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Diachrony of Negation written by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite intensive research, negation remains elusive. Its expression across languages, its underlying cognitive mechanisms, its development across time, and related phenomena, such as negative polarity and negative concord, leave many unresolved issues of both a definitional and a substantive nature. Such issues are at the heart of the present volume, which presents a twofold contribution. The first part offers a mix of large-scale typological surveys and in-depth investigation of the evolution of negation in individual languages and language families that have not frequently been studied from this point of view, such as Chinese, Berber, Quechua, and Austronesian languages. The second part centers on French, a language whose early stages are comparatively richly documented and which therefore provides an important test case for hypotheses about the diachrony of negative marking. Representing, moreover, a variety of theoretical approaches, the volume will be of interest to researchers on negation, language change, and typology.

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019886146X
Total Pages : 751 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Diachronic Syntax written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Ian Roberts's highly successful textbook on diachronic syntax has been fully revised and updated throughout to take account of the multiple developments in the field in the last decade. The book provides a detailed account of how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current minimalist theory and Universal Grammar. This new edition offers expanded coverage of a range of topics, including null subjects, the Final-over-Final Condition, the diachrony of wh-movement, the Tolerance Principle, and creoles and creolization, and explores further advances in the theory of parametric variation. Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, and the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of key terms. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, the volume will remain an ideal textbook for students of historical linguistics and a valuable reference for researchers and students in related areas such as syntax, comparative linguistics, language contact, and language acquisition.

Author : David Willis
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191667978
Total Pages : 556 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean written by David Willis and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks.

Author : Laurel J. Brinton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107113644
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Historical Linguistics written by Laurel J. Brinton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches, this is an advanced textbook on the study of English historical linguistics.

Author : Merja Kytö
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783034303729
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Change and Variation from Old English to Late Modern English written by Merja Kytö and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto's concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process - such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation - through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto's writings and an index of linguistic terms.

Author : N. Armstrong
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137284390
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics written by N. Armstrong and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-14 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

Author : Peter Trudgill
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199604347
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sociolinguistic Typology written by Peter Trudgill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how far social factors explain why human societies produce different kinds of language at different times and places and why some languages and dialects get simpler while others get more complex. It does so in the context of a wide range of languages and societies.