Abstract
In the present paper I investigate, from a Minimalist perspective and using data from the Freiburg English Dialect corpus, the patterns of Negative Concord (NC) attested in different Traditional Dialects of British English. By arguing that lexical variation exists in the negative operator used to express sentential negation, which is truly semantic in Standard English but carries an interpretable negative feature in Traditional Dialects of British English, I explain why NC, understood as syntactic Agree between [iNeg] and [uNeg] features, is attested in the latter but not in the former. In the same vein, by arguing that in Traditional Dialects of British English two lexical entries are possible for n-words which contrast in the interpretability of the negative feature they carry ([iNeg] vs. [uNeg]), the optionality of NC in the studied Non-Standard dialects of English as well as the different patterns observed in the data can be accounted for.
References
Acquaviva, Paolo. 1997. The logical form of negation: A study of operator-variable structures in syntax. New York: Garland.
Adger, David, and Jennifer Smith. 2010. Variation in agreement: A lexical feature-based approach. Lingua 120: 1109–1134.
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2002. Negation in Non-Standard British English. Gaps, regularizations and asymmetries. London: Routledge.
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2005. Negative Concord in British English dialects. In Aspects of English negation, ed. Yoko Iyeiri, 113–137. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Beal, Joan C. 1993. The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English. In Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, ed. James Milroy, and Lesley Milroy, 187–213. London: Longman.
Beal, Joan C., and Karen P. Corrigan. 2005. No, nay, never: Negation in Tyneside English. In Aspects of English negation, ed. Yoko Iyeiri, 139–157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Borer, Hagit. 1984. Parametric syntax: Case studies in Semitic and Romance languages. Dordrecht: Foris.
Bosque, Ignacio. 1980. Sobre la negación. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra.
Bowers, John. 1993. The syntax of predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 591–656.
Chambers, Jack K., and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cheshire, Jenny. 1998. English negation from an interactional perspective. In The sociolinguistics reader. Vol. 1: Multilingualism and variation, ed. Peter Trudgill, and Jenny Cheshire, 127–144. London: Arnold.
Cheshire, Jenny, Vivian Edwards, and Pamela Whittle. 1993. Non-standard English and dialect levelling. In Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, ed. James Milroy, and Lesley Milroy, 53–96. London: Longman.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Citko, Barbara. 2005. On the nature of Merge: External Merge, Internal Merge, and Parallel Merge. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 475–496.
Citko, Barbara. 2011. Multidominance. In Oxford handbook of linguistic minimalism, ed. Cedric Boeckx, 96–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Swart, Henriëtte, and Ivan Sag. 2002. Negation and negative concord in Romance. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 373–417.
de Vries, Mark. 2005. Merge: Properties and boundary conditions. Linguistics in the Netherlands 22: 219–230.
de Vries, Mark. 2009. On multidominance and linearization. Biolinguistics 3: 344–403.
den Dikken, Marcel, Richard Larson, and Peter Ludlow. 1997. Intensional transitive verbs and abstract clausal complementation. Ms., SUNY STONY. http://semantics.univ-paris1.fr/pdf/itv.pdf. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.
den Dikken, Marcel, André Meinunger, and Chris Wilder. 2000. Pseudoclefts and ellipsis. Studia Linguistica 54: 49–89.
Déprez, Viviane. 1997. Two types of Negative Concord. Probus 9: 103–143.
Déprez, Viviane. 2000. Parallel (a)symmetries and the internal structure of negative expressions. Natural Language and Linguistics Theory 18: 253–342.
Déprez, Viviane. 2011. Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-parametric approach to Negative Concord. In The evolution of negation: Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, ed. Pierre Larrivée, and Richard Ingham, 221–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Espinal, M. Teresa. 2000. On the semantic status of N-words in Catalan and Spanish. Lingua 110: 557–580.
Espinal, M. Teresa. 2007. Licensing expletive negation and Negative Concord in Catalan and Spanish. In La négation dans les langues romanes, Linguisticae Investigationes Supplementa 26, ed. Franck Floricic, 49–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Espinal, M. Teresa, and Susagna Tubau. To appear. Meaning of words, meaning of sentences. Building the meaning of n-words. In Grammatical interfaces in Romance linguistics, eds. Susann Fischer and Christoph Gabriel. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1999. Affective dependencies. Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 367–421.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2000. Negative…concord? Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 18: 457–523.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. N-words and Negative Concord. In The Blackwell companion to syntax, ed. Martin Everaert, and Henk van Riemsdijk, 327–391. Oxford: Blackwell.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997. The landscape of polarity items. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Groningen.
Haegeman, Liliane. 1995. The syntax of negation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haegeman, Liliane, and Raffaella Zanuttini. 1991. Negative heads and the Neg criterion. The Linguistic Review 8: 233–251.
Heim, Irene. 1987. Where does the definiteness restriction apply? Evidence from the definiteness of variables. In The representation of (in)definiteness, Vol. 14 of Current studies in linguistics series, ed. Eric J. Reuland, and Alice G.B. ter Meulen, 21–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Herburger, Elena. 2001. The Negative Concord puzzle revisited. Natural Language Semantics 9: 289–333.
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Iatridou, Sabine. 1990. About Agr(P). Linguistic Inquiry 21: 551–577.
Iatridou, Sabine, and Ivy Sichel. 2011. Negative DPs, A-movement, and scope diminishment. Linguistic Inquiry 42: 595–629.
Ingham, Richard. 2007. NegP and negated constituent movement in the history of English. Transactions of the Philological Society 105: 1–33.
Jacobs, Joachim. 1980. Lexical decomposition in Montague Grammar. Theoretical Linguistics 7: 121–136.
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: Allen and Unwin.
Johnson, Kyle. 1991. Object positions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 9: 577–636.
Klima, Edward S. 1964. Negation in English. In The structure of language. Readings in the philosophy of language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor, and Jerrold J. Katz, 246–323. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Labelle, Marie, and M. Teresa Espinal. 2014. Diachronic changes in negative expressions: The case of French. Lingua 145: 194–225.
Labov, William. 1972. Negative attraction and negative concord in English grammar. Language 48: 773–818.
Ladusaw, William. 1992. Expressing negation. In Proceedings of SALT 2, eds. Chris Baker and David Dowty, 237–259. Columbus: The Ohio State University.
Laka, Itziar. 1990. Negation in syntax: On the nature of functional categories and projections. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lucas, Christopher, and David Willis. 2012. Never again: The multiple grammaticalization of never as a marker of negation in English. English Language and Linguistics 16: 459–485.
Matushansky, Ora. 2006. Head movement in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 37(1): 69–109.
Milsark, Gary. 1977. Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential construction in English. Linguistic Analysis 3: 1–29.
Penka, Doris. 2007. Negative indefinites. Ph.D. dissertation, Karl-Eberhards Universität Tübingen.
Penka, Doris. 2011. Negative indefinites. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Penka, Doris, and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2010. Negation and polarity: An introduction. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 28: 771–786.
Pesetsky, David, and Esther Torrego. 2007. The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features. In Phrasal and clausal architecture: Syntactic derivation and interpretation, ed. Simin Karimi, Vida Samilian, and Wendy Wilkins, 262–294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365–424.
Potts, Chris. 2000. When even ‘no’’s neg is splittsville. Jorge Hankamer’s Webfest. http://ling.ucsc.edu//Jorge/index.html. Accessed 25 Sept 2014.
Puskás, Genoveva. 2012. Licensing double negation in NC and non-NC languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30: 611–649.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Rullman, Hotze. 1995. Geen einheid. Tabu 25: 191–198.
Sauerland, Uli. 2000. No ‘no’: On the crosslinguistic absence of a determiner ‘no’. In Proceedings of Tsukuba workshop on determiners and quantification, ed. Uli Sauerland, 415–444. Tsukuba: Tsukuba University.
Temmerman, Tanja. 2012. Multidominance, ellipsis, and quantifier scope. Ph.D. dissertation, LOT, Utrecht.
Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Negation in English speech and writing: A study in variation. London: Academic Press.
Trudgill, Peter. 1990. The Dialects of England, 1st ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, Peter. 1999. The Dialects of England, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tubau, Susagna. 2015. ‘Neither’, ‘(n)or nothing’ and ‘hardly’ in Negative Concord constructions in Traditional Dialects of British English. Sintagma. Revista de Lingüística 27: 7–24.
Tubau, Susagna, and Richard Ingham. 2015. Some historical notes on English negation: unethes, almost and hardly. In Studies in linguistic variation and change: From Old to Middle English, ed. Fabienne Toupin, and Brian Lowrey, 215–226. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
van Riemsdijk, Henk C. 2006. Grafts follow from Merge. In Phases of interpretation, ed. Mara Frascarelli, 17–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1991. Syntactic properties of sentential negation: A comparative study of Romance languages. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2009. On French negation. Ms. UvA. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000885. Accessed 23 Oct 2014.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2011. On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites. Journal of Comparative Linguistics 14: 111–138.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2012. There is only one way to agree. The Linguistic Review 29(3): 491–539.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tubau, S. Lexical variation and Negative Concord in Traditional Dialects of British English. J Comp German Linguistics 19, 143–177 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-016-9079-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-016-9079-4