Abstract
This paper builds on Wallage (2013) to demonstrate that pragmatic activation plays a role in two processes of grammaticalisation in early English—not only in the grammaticalisation of the negative marker not during Middle English (c. 1100–1500AD), but also in the grammaticalisation of do as a tense marker in Early Modern English negative clauses (c. 1500–1700AD). While competing variants are semantically equivalent, different variants are used to mark different pragmatic functions. Innovative forms tend to appear in pragmatically activated (discourse-given) propositions and older forms in inactivated (discourse-new) propositions. Logistic regression analyses of diachronic data provide a way to identify pragmatic changes in progress, and hence to ascertain what role the loss of functional constraints on a form plays in its grammaticalisation. van der Auwera (2009), Hansen (2009) and Hansen and Visconti (2009) argue that pragmatic change precedes the grammaticalisation of the French negative marker pas. They argue this accounts for its increased use over time. However, the overall frequencies of not and do increase despite pragmatic constraints on their use remaining consistent over time. Instead, pragmatic constraints on not and do are lost at the point when the forms are grammaticalised—that is, when the competitors to not and do are lost.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank the organisers of the workshop Negation and polarity: Interfaces and cognition (CIL19, Geneva, July 2013), Pierre Larrivée and Chungmin Lee, for the opportunity to present this work. Thanks too to the audience in Geneva for helpful and insightful comments, and particularly to Montserrat Batllori and two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
- 2.
Thanks in particular to Laurence Horn for the suggestion to investigate this particular case study.
- 3.
All Middle English examples from the PPCME2 corpus (Kroch & Taylor 2000). For further details of the PPCME2 texts, including the editions used in compiling the corpus see http://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/info/text-classification.html.
- 4.
The distribution of many other Catalan negative polarity elements can also be related to pragmatic activation. See Batllori (2016 this volume) for discussion of these.
- 5.
Clauses involving negative arguments or negative adverbials, either as the sole negative word in the clause, or in negative concord with ne, ne…not or not are excluded here, as ne…not and not occur very rarely in negative concord with a negative argument or a negative adverbial. These contexts are treated separately. See Sect. 2.4 for more discussion of the relationship between the Jespersen Cycle and negative concord.
- 6.
That is the first 25 % of the main clauses and the first 25 % of subordinate clauses in each text, in order to produce a sample balanced across clause types, and representative of all the texts in the corpus as a whole.
- 7.
A reviewer notes that different verbs may also progress through the Jespersen Cycle in different ways, with verbs like French savoir ‘know’ and Dutch weten ‘know’ retaining stage one pre-verbal negatives longer than other verb types. The same appears to be true for clauses with Middle English witan ‘know’. These retain ne, but as a formal as well as syntactic proclitic on the verb, giving rise to negative verb forms such as nyste ‘not know’, as in (i). Hoeksma (2014: 60) notes similar patterns in Middle Dutch.
There are however, too few of these to include as a separate category within the quantitative analysis. Therefore, clauses involving witan ‘to know’ are excluded from the analysis, and the data presented in Table 1. The negative verbs noot neg + woot ‘not knew’ and nyste neg + wiste ‘not know’ continue to negate a clause without the addition of not well into the 14th century, suggesting that these are lexicalised, fixed forms. See Wallage (in preparation) for further discussion and data.
- 8.
The substitution of the negative polarity item any for negative indefinites in clauses with not-negation is an independent development in the standard language. Nevalainen (1996) argues that this loss of negative concord occurs during the 16th century and is largely sociolinguistically motivated.
- 9.
For full text information, including the editions used in the PPCEME corpus, see http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/.
- 10.
Here, I differ from Tottie (1991), who includes both not followed by non-assertive any and also not followed by NPs with indefinite determiners (singular a/an, plural zero-determiner) in her counts of not-negation. However, she notes that not-negation is invariant—that no-negation is not acceptable—in many clauses with indefinite determiners where the determiner has specific reference. In order to avoid issues in distinguishing non-specific and specific indefinite instances of a(n) and the zero-determiner, I focus only on non-assertive negative polarity any, which Tottie (1991: 305) claims has only non-specific reference.
- 11.
The statistics are as follows. A Yates’ correction is employed as there are only 4 tokens of not-negation in discourse-new propositions. Yates Chi-square (1df) = 6.14, p = 0.01.
- 12.
The statistics are as follows: chi-square (1df) = 75.61, p = 0.0001.
- 13.
These include know, wit ‘to know’, boot ‘to avail, be of use’, trow ‘to believe’, ween ‘to believe’, list ‘to desire’.
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Wallage, P. (2016). Identifying the Role of Pragmatic Activation in Changes to the Expression of English Negation. In: Larrivée, P., Lee, C. (eds) Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_9
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