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  • The Diachrony of Negation ed. by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti
  • Wendy Ayres-Bennett
The Diachrony of Negation. Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti. (Studies in Language Companion Series, 160.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014. 258 pp.

This collection follows several recent publications on the history of negation (for example, The Evolution of Negation: Beyond the Jespersen Cycle (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011) and The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)). The short Introduction outlines the reasons for another volume: theoretical issues have typically been discussed in relation to European languages, and notably French, not least because of the rich evidence provided by its historical documentation and different varieties; the aim here is to broaden the range and type of languages studied and, consequently, to revisit key issues (for example, whether to posit a Quantifier Cycle). Chapters 2 and 3 thus test, on typologically different, non-European languages, generalizations hitherto founded mostly on European ones. For instance, based largely on French, scholars have argued that what is here called double clausal negation (e.g. je ne le vois pas) and negative concord (e.g. je ne vois personne) are related phenomena; Lauren Van Alsenoy and Johan van der Auwera examine 179 languages from Asia, Africa, and the Americas and conclude that the two rarely coincide and, where they do, they may interact in a different way from French. Van der Auwera then joins with Frens Vossen to test the applicability of the Jespersen Cycle to 409 Austronesian languages where they find potential manifestations of the Cycle particularly in the languages of Vanuatu, but equally examples of triple and even quadruple negation. Chapters 4 to 6 provide case studies from less-studied non-European languages, which typically lack much actual diachronic evidence: Quechua varieties of South America (Edith Pineda-Bernuy), Taiwanese Southern Min (Hui-Ling Yang), and Berber (Vermondo Brugnatelli). The last three essays return to aspects of the history of French negation: contrary to expectations these do not directly pick up the principal themes of the previous sections and are generally more limited in scope. Building on her previous work on jamais, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen explores the evolution of two competing temporal/aspectual n-words, plus and mais, in medieval French, and concludes that while they underwent a process of paradigmaticization, their evolution appears to have followed different paths, thus undermining the case for a Quantifier Cycle in French. Richard Ingham and Amel Kallel, analysing the history of quelque and aucun, similarly [End Page 574] concentrate on the properties of individual lexical items (micro-parametric factors). Finally, Pierre Larrivée considers negative doubling (pas + n-word such as aucun, rien, jamais) with a view to determining whether vernacular varieties are stable. All three chapters raise important issues about the appropriate corpora for such studies. In her analysis of the Base de français mediéval, Dictionnaire du moyen français, and Textes de l’ancien français, Hansen notes that she is not taking into account possible regional differences, but makes no mention of potential variation according to text type/genre. Ingham and Kallel analyse private aristocratic and royal correspondence, although recent studies of usage in different genres in Frantext have suggested that correspondence is not necessarily the most progressive linguistically. Larrivée’s paper is necessarily speculative given the dearth of vernacular texts pre-1700 (many of the texts investigated are written by upper-class subjects for satirical or comedic purposes) and the relative lack of empirical evidence about the differing normative pressures in France and Quebec.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Murray Edwards College, Cambridge
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