The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean: Volume II: Patterns and Processes
Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, and David Willis
Abstract
The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cy ... More
The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cycles), including the diachronic development of negative concord. In each case, there are relevant empirical observations across the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The book considers both language-internal and language-contact motivations for the changes observed, developing a generative account of the developments in terms of semantic change, reanalysis, and child-language acquisition, integrating insights from functionalist approaches that invoke language use as a motivation behind these cycles. Language contact is shown to have played a significant role in the spread of negation systems. The result is a holistic account of language change in the domain of negation, developed from comparing the diachronies of languages across Europe and incorporating insights from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.
Keywords:
negation,
Jespersen’s cycle,
indefinite,
quantifier cycle,
free-choice cycle,
negative concord,
language contact,
mechanisms of language change
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199602544 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199602544.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Anne Breitbarth, author
Associate Professor in Historical German Linguistics, Ghent University
Christopher Lucas, author
Senior Lecturer in Arabic Linguistics, SOAS University of London
David Willis, author
Reader in Historical Linguistics, University of Cambridge
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