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Postverbal negation and the lexical split of not

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2019

MORGAN MACLEOD
MORGAN MACLEOD*
Affiliation:
School of Communication and Media, University of Ulster, Shore Road, Newtownabbey BT37 0QB, [email protected]
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Abstract

In Early Modern English, verbal negation was commonly expressed by the addition of not directly after a lexical verb, a construction which subsequently underwent a pronounced decline in frequency as part of broader changes in verbal syntax. Even after the rise of the auxiliary do, however, constructions with the same surface form as the earlier pattern have continued to be used as a stylistically marked alternative. Data from the Hansard Corpus are presented here to show an increase in the frequency of these constructions since the mid twentieth century. The syntactic environments in which contemporary postverbal negation occurs are compared to the patterns existing in Early Modern English, and evaluated in the light of trends within constituent negation. The interpretation proposed is that a lexical split has occurred to produce two separate lexemes of the form not, with different syntactic properties. Postverbal negation would thus occur in Present-day English when speakers choose to make use of the new lexeme.

Keywords

Englishnegationverbsyntaxarchaism
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 667 - 685
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

My interest in the phenomenon of postverbal negation goes back some time, to my presentation entitled ‘Archaisms and their implications’, involving a different and much smaller dataset, from the Philological Society's Symposium on Linguistics and Philology in March 2010. I would like to express my thanks to everyone who commented on that earlier work. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the present article for their comments and suggestions.

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