Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T06:55:07.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Never again: the multiple grammaticalization of never as a marker of negation in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2012

CHRISTOPHER LUCAS  and
DAVID WILLIS
CHRISTOPHER LUCAS
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 9XG, [email protected]
DAVID WILLIS
Affiliation:
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In both standard and nonstandard varieties of English there are several contexts in which the word never functions as a sentential negator rather than as a negative temporal adverb. This article investigates the pragmatic and distributional differences between the various non-temporal uses of never and examines their synchronic and historical relationship to the ordinary temporal quantifier use, drawing on corpora of Early Modern and present-day British English. Primary focus is on (i) a straightforward negator use that in prescriptively approved varieties of English has an aspectual restriction to non-chance, completive achievement predicates in the preterite, but no such restriction in nonstandard English; and (ii) a distinct categorical-denial use that quantifies over possible perspectives on a situation. Against Cheshire (1998), it is argued that neither of these uses represents continuity with non-temporal uses of never in Middle English, but both are instead relatively recent innovations resulting from semantic reanalysis and the semanticization of implicatures.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 459 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This research was carried out as part of the project The development of negation in the languages of Europe. The authors would like to express their thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the project, to Anne Breitbarth, Wim van der Wurff and three anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions on drafts of the article and to audiences at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 (Leuven 2008) and the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Osaka 2011). Any errors or omissions remain our own.

References

Middle English primary sources cited

The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, ed. Wright, Thomas, Early English Text Society, vol. 33. London: Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906.Google Scholar
The English Works of John Gower, ed. Macaulay, George C., 2 vols., Early English Text Society Extra Series, vols. 81 and 82. London: Early English Text Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1900–1, vol. 81, 1–456; vol. 82, 1–478.Google Scholar
Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. Bergen, Henry, parts 1–3. Early English Text Society Extra Series, vols. 97, 103 and 106. London: Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906, 1906, 1910 (reprinted as one vol., 1996).Google Scholar
The Romance of William of Palerne, ed. Skeat, Walter W., Early English Text Society Extra Series, vol. 1. London: Early English Text Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1867 (reprinted 1996), 6–175.Google Scholar
The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. Kölbing, Eugen and Day, Mabel, Early English Text Society, vol. 188. London: Early English Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1932 (reprinted 1988).Google Scholar
Modern English texts cited from dictionaries and texts found within corpora are cited according to the conventions of the dictionary or corpus concernedGoogle Scholar

References

Bailey, Beryl Loftman. 1966. Jamaican Creole syntax: A transformational approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 1993. The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English. In Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley (eds.), Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, 187–213. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. & Corrigan, Karen P.. 2005. No, nay, never: Negation in Tyneside English. In Iyeiri, Yoko (ed.), Aspects of English negation, 139–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Burnard, Lou. 2007. Reference guide for the British National Corpus (XML edition). British National Corpus Consortium.Google Scholar
Burridge, Kate. 1993. Syntactic change in Germanic: Aspects of language change in Germanic with particular reference to Middle Dutch (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 89). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1985. English never and the problem of where grammars stop. Polyglot 6, fiche 1.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1998. English negation from an interactional perspective. In Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Tottie, Gunnel & Van der Wurff, Wim (eds.), Negation in the history of English, 29–53. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Edwards, Viv & Whittle, Pamela. 1993. Non-standard English and dialect levelling. In Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley (eds.), Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, 53–96. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Edwards, Viv & Whittle, Pamela. 1995. Urban British dialect grammar: The question of dialect levelling. In Werlen, Iwar (ed.), Verbale Kommunikation in der Stadt, 67–109. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny & Fox, Sue. 2009. Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language Variation and Change 21, 1–38.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1976. Mica. Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università di Padova 1, 101–12.Google Scholar
Colter, Rob. 1981. Grammar to go. Toronto: Anansi.Google Scholar
Copley, Bridget. 2002. The semantics of the future. PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Detges, Ulrich & Waltereit, Richard. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semantic-pragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21, 151–95.Google Scholar
Gelderen, Elly van. 2004a. Economy, innovation and prescriptivism: From Spec to head and head to head. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7, 59–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelderen, Elly van. 2004b. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Edward S. 1867. Good English; or, popular errors in language. New York: Armstrong & Son.Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard & Waltereit, Richard. 2009. On the role of generalized conversational implicature in semantic change. In Bunting, Jacqueline, Desai, Sapna, Peachey, Robert, Straughn, Christopher & Tomková, Zuzana (eds.), Proceedings from the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The main session, 33–46. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Holthausen, Ferdinand. 1948. Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altwestnordischen, Altnorwegisch-isländischen, einschliesslich der Lehn- und Fremdwörter sowie der Eigennamen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kyle. 2001. What VP ellipsis can do, and what it can't, but not why. In Baltin, Mark & Collins, Chris (eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 439–79. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jóhannesson, Alexander. 1956. Isländisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke.Google Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van. 1998. Sentential negation and word order in Old English. In Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Gunnel, Tottie & van der Wurff, Wim (eds.), Negation in the history of English, 147–66. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, Jenny, Cheshire, Torgersen, Eivind & Fox, Sue. 2009. Linguistic innovators: The English of adolescents in London, 2004–5. www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=6127, accessed 3 April 2012.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2004. Global synopsis: Morphological and syntactic variation in English. In Kortmann, Bernd, Burridge, Kate, Mesthrie, Rajend, Schneider, Edgar W. & Upton, Clive (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English, vol. 2: Morphology and syntax, 1142–1202. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A history of English negation. London: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony J. 1978. A study on the origins of pidginization. Language 54, 314–47.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Negative concord as an English ‘vernacular universal’. Journal of English Linguistics 34, 257–78.Google Scholar
Partee, Barbara H. 1973. Some structural analogies between tense and pronouns in English. Linguistics and Philosophy 7, 243–86.Google Scholar
Partridge, Eric. 1995 [1942]. Usage and abusage. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Potsdam, Eric. 1997. NegP and subjunctive complements in English. Linguistic Inquiry 28, 533–41.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., Wasow, Thomas, Zwicky, Arnold M. & Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2007. Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new. American Speech 82, 3–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Craige. 1996. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Yoon, Jae-Hak & Kathol, Andreas (eds.), OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 49: Papers in semantics, 91–136. Columbus: Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott. 2006. Fine-tuning Jespersen's Cycle. In Birner, Betty J. & Ward, Gregory (eds.), Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in honour of Laurence R. Horn, 327–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sundby, Bertil, Kari Bjørge, Anne & Haugland, Kari E.. 1991. A dictionary of English normative grammar, 1700–1800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Teyssier, Paul. 1986. La négation dans les créoles portugais. In Bouvier, Jean-Claude (ed.), Morphosyntaxe des langues romanes: Actes du XVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes (Aix-en-Provence, 29 août – 3 septembre 1983), vol. 4, 591–604. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. 1985. Welsh English: A grammatical conspectus. In Viereck, Wolfgang (ed.), Focus on England and Wales, 213–21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Timberlake, Alan. 1977. Reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change. In Charles, N. Li (ed.), Mechanisms of syntactic change, 141–77. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter & Hannah, Jean. 1982. International English: A guide to varieties of standard English. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Vries, Jan de. 1957–61. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Wiseman, Charles. 1764. A complete English grammar on a new plan. For the use of foreigners, and such natives as would acquire a scientifical knowledge of their own tongue. London: W. Nicol.Google Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1997. Negation and clausal structure: A comparative study of Romance languages. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar