Why can?t we just say no? An analysis of Early Modern English negation and its implications for the development of Jespersen?s Cycle

OLIVER JOSE MARIA

Edinburgh

Conferencia; 8th Annual Conference of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain (ULAB); 2018

University of Edinburgh

Jespersen?s cycle (1917) is well known for the analysis of negation in natural languages. However, looking into the developmental pattern of a fully-fledgedNegative Phrase (Radford 1997, 2009) in terms of grammaticalization (Roberts, 2003) can reveal deeper changes in the configuration of negation in English. Our main objective is to carry out a corpus study in order to analyze the period known as ElizabethanEnglish, which reveals the presence of a bridge construction between steps 3 and 4, illustrated by (1): (1)... it not belongs to you (Shakespeare, 2H4 IV.i.95/6): ?I not + finite verb? Put simply, how can we account for the fact that the finite verb ends upafter not? A preliminary answer given by Radford is that finite T used to contain a strong tense affix feature which triggered movement of V located downward towards its head (allowing for sentences like ?I care not for her?). The loss of this feature eventuallyled to affix hopping downwards and a configuration like (1). According to Tieken (1987:46), the pattern "was at that time very likely ... characteristic of colloquial language". By hypothesis, then, do-support developed as a complementary change to the presenceof this configuration, a last resort condition derived from the economy principle, and quickly took hold. Tieken found no more than three cases like (1) from the 18th century. The development of the bridge construction is proving of the development of a new configuration, perhaps a new stage, which ultimately can be explained interms of gain and loss of its relevant syntactic features.