A history of English negation (review)

Although the title suggests an exclusively historical analysis, this book provides a wide-ranging examination of English negation with an analysis that incorporates considerations from a variety of linguistic fields. By integrating the work of grammarians, historians, sociolinguists, and language acquisition theorists, Mazzon examines the complexities and interconnections of negation. The extensive use of electronic corpora for the study expands the book’s audience to include linguists who are studying other linguistic phenomena.

Ch. 1 sets the stage for the understanding of the previous work on negation and provides the context for understanding the driving forces for change in negation. The ‘neg-cycle’ is motivated by two conflicting principles in language: (1) the neg-first principle, and (2) the end-weight principle. The chapter also introduces the terms and conventions that are used throughout the book. Neg-Concord, or the use of multiple negation, is introduced and dealt with repeatedly in the text. Finally, the chapter introduces the methodology and sources for the data collection and analysis. Twenty-five electronic texts from Old and Middle English were analyzed in their entirety, and other texts from these eras were employed for sample sentences.

Chs. 2 and 3 describe changes that occurred over four periods: Old English, Early Middle English, English of the Middle Ages, and Early Modern English. The data show syntactic tendencies during these different times. As M warns, however, the data are not consistent within even a single document. The texts were from a wide spectrum of time, location, and genre, and often the examples of certain phenomena were limited. Despite her warning, the author demonstrates tendencies and trends that reflect in such areas as Neg-Concord, Neg-Coordination, and in constituent and affixal negation.

In Chs. 4–6 M changes direction in several ways: First, the focus moves to present-day English and the examples become more transparent for contemporary readers. Second, because data used for these chapters come from prior research on negation and not from corpora, the analysis shifts away from using frequency data. Last, and most important, the author begins to integrate the historical discussion with a wider range of negation issues. The issues include placement of negatives in the sentence, sentential vs. constituent negation, cliticization, and other semantic and syntactic issues. Further, the author deals with pragmatic considerations that motivate the way negation is communicated using politeness and hedging strategies. The final portion of the book examines the implications of the conclusions from the analysis. After discussing the variations among nonstandard English varieties, M mentions implications for studies of language learning, language universals, and language change.

Two drawbacksof the volume are its lack of information about the statistical significance of the reported data, and the lack of glosses for samples of data presented from older English sources. Nevertheless, the book should be useful not only for linguists who are studying negation, but also for scholars of language change and variation, as the overall approach lends itself to the study of a wide range of linguistic forms.