The development of negation in the languages of Europe
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Linguistics
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Publications
Blaxter T
(2018)
Pragmatic differentiation of negative markers in the early stages of Jespersen's cycle in North Germanic
in Diachronica
Breitbarth A
(2009)
A hybrid approach to Jespersen's cycle in West Germanic
in The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
Breitbarth A
(2013)
Indefinites, negation and Jespersen's Cycle in the history of Low German
in Diachronica
Breitbarth A
(2011)
Modality and negation in the history of Low German
in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
Breitbarth, Anne
(2014)
The history of Low German negation
David Willis (Author)
"Clause structure & word order in the history of German".
David Willis (Author)
(2010)
"Continuity & Change in Grammar".
David Willis (Author)
(2011)
"Cycles of Grammaticalization".
Lucas C
(2007)
Jespersen's cycle in Arabic and Berber 1
in Transactions of the Philological Society
Lucas C
(2012)
Contact-induced grammatical change Towards an explicit account
in Diachronica
LUCAS C
(2009)
Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation
in Journal of Linguistics
Lucas C
(2010)
Negative -š in Palestinian (and Cairene) Arabic: Present and possible past
in Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics
LUCAS C
(2012)
Never again: the multiple grammaticalization of never as a marker of negation in English
in English Language and Linguistics
Willis D
(2010)
Motivating the emergence of new markers of sentential negation The case of Welsh ddim
in Diachronica
Willis D
(2011)
Grammatical ChangeOrigins, Nature, Outcomes
WILLIS D
(2010)
Reconstructing last week's weather: Syntactic reconstruction and Brythonic free relatives
in Journal of Linguistics
Willis, David; Lucas, Christopher; Breitbarth, Anne
(2013)
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean: v. I: Case Studies
| Description | The aims and objectives of this project were to: (i) survey the paths of development of negative items in the languages of Europe; (ii) develop a formal analysis within minimalism of the principal pathways of change; (iii) construct a language-internal model of change to explain the developments and their directionality in terms of patterns and strategies of child language acquisition of negation, consistent with the historical patterns noted, and to examine the interaction between an acquisitional account of the changes and one involving language contact. These aims have been achieved largely as envisaged, and the results of the research associated with them is presented in the two volumes of the project monograph, as well as in the various other outputs produced individually and collaboratively by the project members. In various articles, we have demonstrated the paths of change experienced by the languages in which project members have particular expertise: German, Dutch (Breitbarth), Arabic and other Afroasiatic languages (Lucas), Welsh, Breton, Slavonic (Willis) and English (Lucas & Willis). We have provided detailed documentation of Jespersen's Cycle in Arabic, Berber, Breton and Welsh for the first time. In-depth research of this kind, together with collaboration with a range of experts on negation in other European languages (French, Italo-Romance, English, German, Scandinavian, Mordvin), has allowed us to develop a comparative typology of the pathways by which new markers of negation develop. We have shown on the one hand commonalities in the sources of new markers (from minimizers, indefinite pronouns and anaphoric negators 'no!') and, on the other, differences in the speed of the developments and the order in which they take place. We show that, in some cases, Jespersen's Cycle is a multi-stage process and therefore more gradual than previously thought. Our work on the development of indefinites has shown two major pathways of development crosslinguistically, polarity-neutral indefinite 'anyone' > negative indefinite 'no one' and from free-choice indefinite 'anyone you like' to neutral or negative indefinite 'someone'/'no one'. We have developed an account of these developments based on findings from the literature on child language acquisition, which shows that children first use them exclusively in negative contexts, and only later acquire distributions across the whole range of downward entailing contexts (interrogatives, conditionals). The frequency of negative contexts relative to other downward entailing contexts leads us to expect that children will occasionally fail to acquire the full range of available contexts. Our work goes beyond previous formal accounts based on specifier-to-head reanalyses and functionalist accounts based on pragmatic extravagance and semantic bleaching. Instead we identify the key factors determining whether the conservative syntax and semantics of items undergoing changes are successfully acquired by children. For instance, the model of Jespersen's Cycle that we have developed argues that innovation of new markers of negation (reanalyses like pas DP > [+neg]AP) are favoured in languages with classes of verb (e.g. verbs of success or compensation) allowing optional extent arguments, and in languages with ambiguous case marking, languages lacking indefinite articles or where there are alternative exponents of the item's original meaning. These themes are explored in various forms across the project's output. This research combines depth of coverage for individual language histories with the breadth of coverage needed to make crosslinguistic historical generalisations in a methodologically unique and innovative way. More broadly, then, we have demonstrated that generalisation across language histories is possible at a non-superficial level of analysis. |
| Exploitation Route | They could be applied to different languages or used to develop further theoretical models of syntax or language change. |
| Sectors | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| URL | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338302574_The_history_of_negation_in_the_languages_of_Europe_and_the_Mediterranean_volume_II_patterns_and_processes |
| Description | "Cycles of grammaticalization", Invite from the "Leverhulme International Network, 2007-9. |
| Organisation | The Leverhulme Trust |
| Department | Leverhulme International Network |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | Information taken from Final Report |
| Description | "The development of the Welsh Language", Invite from British Academy Research Project, 2008. |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Information taken from Final Report |
| Description | DFG Research network "Netzwerk Historische Syntax". |
| Organisation | German Research Foundation |
| Country | Germany |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | Information taken from Final Report |