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.
Download or read book Negative Concord A Hundred Years On written by Johan van der Auwera and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-11-18 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Download or read book Sentential Negation and Negative Concord written by Hedzer Hugo Zeijlstra and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
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.
Download or read book Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek written by Katerina Chatzopoulou and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek, based on extensive data from major stages of the language. It also provides a new semantic interpretation of Jespersen's cycle that explains the Greek developments and those in other languages.
Download or read book Introducing Sociolinguistics written by Miriam Meyerhoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third edition of Miriam Meyerhoff’s highly successful textbook provides a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field and covers foundation issues, recent advances and current debates. It presents familiar or classic data in new ways, and supplements the familiar with fresh examples from a wide range of languages and social settings. It clearly explains the patterns and systems that underlie language variation in use, as well as the ways in which alternations between different language varieties index personal style, social power and national identity. New features of the third edition: Every chapter has been revised and updated with current research in the field, including material on sexuality, polylanguaging and lifespan change; Additional Connections with theory and Facts: No, really? are included throughout; Data from sign languages, historical linguistics and Asia-Pacific sociolinguistics have been revised and expanded; A brand new companion website featuring more examples and exercises can be found at www.routledge.com/textbooks/meyerhoff. Chapters include exercises that enable readers to engage critically with the text, break-out boxes making connections between sociolinguistics and linguistic or social theory, and brief, lively add-ons guaranteed to make the book a memorable and enjoyable read. With a full glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading, this text gives students all the tools they need for an excellent command of sociolinguistics. It can also be used in conjunction with The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader, Doing Sociolinguistics and the online resources shared by all three books.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar written by Bas Aarts and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 854 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. The volume's expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, covering a range of theoretical approaches and including the relationship between 'core' grammar and other areas of language.
Download or read book Introducing Sociolinguistics written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Negation and Contact written by Debra Ziegeler and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas, such as negative raising, negative concord, and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, with probably less attention devoted to the study of negation across dialects of languages, or across contact languages. The observation of universal quantification in the scope of negation in the English spoken in Singapore, for example, is an area which has been largely under-researched in the literature, as has the rarely-reported phenomenon of negative raising in Singapore English. The present volume profiles some of the problems of negation in English and Singapore English, framed against the background of studies of negation in other contact dialects of English and pidgins/creoles, and offering a diverse range of theoretical approaches to the problems.
Download or read book Continuity and Change in Grammar written by Anne Breitbarth and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the actuation problem: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection."
