Negation in the History of English (review)

As the editor-contributors to this volume cheerfully note in the introduction (1–8), this volume demonstrates that even a topic as extensively researched as the history of negation in English remains fertile ground for further research, not to mention that most of the papers indicate issues in need of yet further investigation.

The twelve articles arranged in alpabetical order by their author’s last names, favor Middle and Early Modern English, with two restricted to Old English and only one devoted to current English (colloquial at that). Following tradition, most of the articles identify the history of English with the progression toward standard written English, for example, with respect to the decline of multiple negation in that variety, though references to studies of current nonstandard varieties show an increasing trend to take them into account, where relevant—and they are often relevant. Part of the problem is that most of the contributors work outside English-speaking countries and, apart from print, depend largely for their original research on the few large written or relatively standard spoken corpora that are internationally available for current (or recent) English. Thus, for example, Terttu Nevalainen’s ‘The facts and nothing but: The (non-)grammaticalisation of negative exclusives in English’ (167–88) is valuable and engaging but seems unaware that such negative syntactic constructions as ‘they don’t have/there ain’t but two kinds’ are still common in nonstandard varieties; that might have a bearing on why no(thing-)but did not grammaticalize in English.

As might be expected, there is a good deal of interrelationship of issues among the articles, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not. For example, Olga Fischer’s ‘On negative raising in the history of English’ (55–100), the longest article, has some relationship to Masatomo Ukaji’s ‘The scope of negative concord’ (269–94). Fischer’s article concerns the development of such constructions as ‘I do n’t think she’ll come’ instead of ‘I think that she wo n’t come’, while among the large variety of historical constructions that Ukaji considers to reflect negative concord are some involving negative raising along the order of ‘I do n’t think that she wo n’t come’, meaning ‘that she will come’—as if pleonastically. While Ukaji refers in passing to Fischer’s article (235), Fischer does not note that the apparently rare construction that Ukaji exemplifies may have some relevance to mechanisms in her discussion of the history of negative raising. Most of these articles derive from papers presented at a 1994 conference in Leiden on the title topic, but the contributors vary in the extent to which they revised their original papers for publication on the basis of that conference.

The articles are generally of high quality, always thoughtful and informative, and reflect a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Jenny Cheshire’s ‘English negation from an interactive perspective’ (29–54) stands out as more of a sociolinguistic than a historical article, although I would be the last person to criticize its inclusion rather than welcome it on that basis. It deals with uses of never in current colloquial speech that refer to a limited rather than the universal time span. In the course of discussion she criticizes a much earlier paper by William Labov for proposing a discontinuity between traditional English use of never and its extensive use in Hawaiian Creole as the general negator, e.g. ‘(the ghost) never had a head’ [didn’t have a head], cf. the common West African pidgin/creole etymologically blended negator noba. Cheshire connects the flexibility of never to recurrent English historical trends by pointing out that it provides another way to maintain a negator before the inflected verb.

I suspect that Gunnel Tottie would agree, in retrospect, that her article, ‘Affixal and non-affixal...