Negation in Non-Standard British English

Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetries

Lieselotte Anderwald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138976863
• eBook ISBN: 9781134513833
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain.

1 Introduction

Dialect grammar

Despite the advances of radio and television, despite increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard these days. Although it is true that the old, especially isolated and rural, dialects are dying out, they do not seem to be replaced wholly by standard forms, as many dialectologists and philologists of the past feared. Instead, newer, different, but still non-standard forms can increasingly be heard, and despite all prescriptive uproar and outcries, these non-standard forms are alive and well, and seem quite unstoppable.¹ These often newer developments away from the standard have sometimes been captured under the heading of ‘dialect levelling’:² increasing contact between speakers of different dialects leads to both sides adapting their speech and erasing particularly salient features, and developing new features that are surprisingly pervasive. Although these grammatical features are clearly recognizable as non-standard, and although at least some of them are strongly stigmatized, there is no sign that their use is dwindling under the influence of standard English. The question of what constitutes this remarkable robustness of non-standard forms is the main motivating factor for the following investigation. Several possible paths of motivation have been pursued so far; in particular, in sociolinguistics the notion of ‘covert prestige’ plays an important role in explaining why heavily stigmatized forms are nevertheless used by their speakers (cf. Labov 1966; Trudgill 1974). Social factors like ‘solidarity’ or even group pressure should also by no means be discounted (for analyses in terms of network strength cf. Milroy 1980: 19). The main argument of this book will be, however, that there are other – cognitive – factors that have not been considered so far, but that can be shown to play an (additional) important role.

In order to put this book on a sound footing, we shall first of all need a kind of inventory of non-standard forms that would qualify for closer investigation. Fortunately, the interest in dialect grammar (not only of British English) has grown continuously in recent years; a collection of pioneering first studies on individual phenomena appeared in Trudgill and Chambers (1991), whereas Milroy and Milroy (1993) attempted a more comprehensive regional overview, so that today we are better able to say which phenomena are candidates for widespread regional developments, and which of them may indeed still be on the increase. A first list of probable candidates for non-regional features is provided by Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle’s ‘Survey of British Dialect Grammar’ (1993) where the authors note such nationwide features as what used as a relative pronoun, there’s used with plural subjects, the use of ain’t and many more. (A full list can be found in the appendix.)

It is clear that even a book-length study like this cannot even attempt to account for all grammatical features of non-standard English, if this investigation is going to be at all detailed and fine-grained. Fortunately, from Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle’s list, groups of topics emerge that are interrelated. A number of features have to do with the topic of negation (and a range of features will be added to the list), which already suggests that this field might show interesting variation between the non-standard and standard varieties of English. There are also several other reasons for choosing negation as the area of inquiry.

Negation and typology

Negation is a syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomenon that lends itself extremely well to cross-dialectal (as well as cross-linguistic) investigations because negation is what has been called a ‘pragmatic universal’:³ every language (and of course every language variety) must be able to express negative propositions in order to be fully functional.⁴ Negation is also probably one of the most basic human concepts – there is no possible way of describing the function of negation without resorting to circularity, as the discussion in Horn (1989: 45ff.) shows, and a semanticist like Wierzbicka acknowledges this by including a negative operator ‘not’ in her list of ‘semantic primes’, purported to be irreducible, innate human concepts.⁵ The presence of negation is perhaps the one criterion that can distinguish human from animal ‘languages’ qualitatively (Horn 1989: xiii; Horn and Kato 2000: 1). It is therefore not surprising that the study of negation has featured – for centuries – in the studies of eminent logicians, philosophers, linguists and psychologists.⁶ Finally, features of negation have been collected and investigated in many traditional (as well as modern) dialects and sociolects of English, which gives us a reasonable starting point for further comparisons.

A second line of interest of this book lies in the application of a theoretical framework that allows us to ask new questions of non-standard phenomena, and to draw new conclusions from already existing materials. In this way, this book will also present a novel way of looking at the familiar phenomenon of negation. This theoretical approach is the application of functional typology (in the tradition of Greenberg 1966) to the study of variation in one language. As this kind of application is still in its infancy, the rationale behind it shall be explained in a little more detail.

Language typology is the study of linguistic phenomena across languages in order to determine the range and limits of linguistic variation. To this end, languages are classified according to general criteria that emerge from cross-linguistic comparisons. For example, languages can be classified according to whether they have prepositions or postpositions, and these characteristics correlate in an interesting way with the order of basic sentence constituents, showing that not all logically possible combinations are actually attested. These correlations are typically borne out across representative samples of the languages of the world. It is clear, however, that no linguist will be able to judge the grammaticality of structures in, say, a hundred of (preferably) areally and genetically unrelated languages, so that the typologist typically has to rely on directly questioning native speakers, often in the form of answers to specifically designed questionnaires, as well as investigating all other available material, typically written grammars, wherever possible. In most cases, one or at the most a handful of speakers per language can be questioned, for purely practical reasons. However, this is also one of the shortcomings of this kind of linguistic typology: although an enormous number of languages can be investigated, individual languages can only be discussed in a rather superficial way: there simply has to be a trade-off between the breadth and the depth of investigation.

Over the past decades, typological interest has begun to be diverted to more in-depth studies, necessarily of fewer languages, and a whole range were indeed conducted, for example in the international research programme EUROTYP, which concentrated on comparing the languages of Europe. Hawkins (1986) provided another important step in the direction of narrowing the field of inquiry with his detailed comparative study of the two related languages of English and German. The present book is trying to take this approach a logical step further, from geographically and/or historically related languages to the investigation of different varieties of one language. Typological studies typically do not take account of dialects – although this is not an issue of principle, but seems to stem from purely practical reasoning: if written grammars do not exist for the largest number of accepted languages of this world, they certainly do not exist for their dialects; dialect speakers are notoriously difficult to come by; and taking account of dialects would increase the number of varieties exponentially. Also, if one concentrated on those dialects where at least some descriptions already exist, i.e. those in the Western world, this would possibly bias samples of languages even more towards Standard Average European ones. On the other hand, taking account of dialectal variation does not seem to pose problems in principle: any dialect system is a naturally evolved variety of language, and predictions made for the languages of this world, as well as general findings from these large-scale comparisons, should equally hold for individual dialects of one of these languages – quite apart from the fact that the differentiation between what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect does not rest on linguistic criteria alone, and it is therefore intrinsically difficult to draw a borderline between these terms.

This new theoretical approach will therefore provide the background for the detailed investigations which follow.⁷ Although – or perhaps because? – negation is such a pervasive phenomenon, in linguistic typology there have so far been only a handful of studies that are dedicated to this topic. Dahl (1979), Payne (1985) and Dryer (1988), three studies conducted independently and largely in ignorance of each other, work in the traditional typological framework of comparing a large sample of various languages, and they will provide the typological backbone whenever generalizations are made in this investigation. Dahl and Payne try to classify the different negation strategies in their samples. Reassuringly, they come to similar results, showing that in the languages of the world, negation can be broadly divided into syntactic and morphological processes. Payne’s study is slightly more elaborate as it also takes into account negation by negative quantifiers and semantic aspects of negation, whereas Dahl concentrates on sentence negation only. Dryer relates the position of the sentence negator to the basic word order statistically and shows that only a restricted subset of logically possible positions is actually attested. In his functional grammar, Givon (1984) also has a chapter on negation, concentrating, however, on the semantics and pragmatics of negative ‘speech acts’ (Givon 1984: 321–51). His remarks on the morphology of negation (especially 66–7, 232–3) largely coincide with the studies by Dahl and Payne mentioned above.

On a more restricted topic, Haspelmath (1997) provides a general typological study of Indefinite Pronouns where he also looks at what we shall term negative quantifiers and their interaction with the sentence negator in a wide range of languages. Most strikingly, he provides new material for the claim that what is sometimes called ‘double negation’ or ‘multiple negation’ and what will be termed negative concord in this book is the norm rather than the exception if we consider the languages of the world. This will play an important role when we look at the subject of negative concord in non-standard varieties in Chapter 5 – as it seems that it is the (Western European) standard languages that are the odd ones out, rather than the dialects.

A final general typological collection on the subject of negation is Kahrel and van den Berg’s Typological Studies in Negation (1994), which consists of a number of commissioned papers, each dealing with negation in one language. The wide range of languages investigated here includes European and non-European languages, varying from a few thousand speakers to several million, but this collection cannot be representative. Furthermore, although the individual papers are divided into similar sections, the descriptions are so different that direct comparisons are not really possible and no general conclusions can be drawn from this collection. It will therefore not play a great role in the following analyses.

The most interesting study from our point of view is Bernini and Ramat’s Negative Sentences in the Languages of Europe (1996). This in-depth study of negation is restricted to the European languages and thus already takes one step towards the narrowing of the field advocated here. The authors develop several criteria for the classification of negative systems in the European languages and arrive at areal typological comparisons and maps. These maps determine a ‘core’ linguistic area of similar structures in Europe (the ‘Charlemagne’ area, basically comprising Germany, France and Italy) that has been established as the core area of many linguistic features in Europe by various other EUROTYP projects as well.⁸

The explicit criteria developed and used by Bernini and Ramat (1996) might seem to offer a good starting point for the application of typological findings to dialect data. The tumultuous past which negation (along with many other syntactic phenomena) has undergone in the history of English might also suggest the comparison of dialect features with the present day system of standard English as a particularly interesting field of investigation because striking systematic differences may be expected. However, many basic typological features (as, for example, word order and the position of the negator with respect to it, or the three-fold division in the quantifier system into some, any and none) are shared between standard English and the modern English dialects, as well as the traditional dialects recorded ca. one hundred years ago. The second glance therefore reveals that many criteria employed by Bernini and Ramat on the European languages, for example precisely those that relate negative structures to basic word order, unfortunately have no relevance for an investigation of English dialects, because drastic variations, like differences in the basic word order, are clearly not present here.

Just as some criteria of the typological studies mentioned above cannot be applied to dialect comparison directly, in many cases of the following investigations the reverse is also the case: more specific hypotheses for individual dialect phenomena investigated are not available. Thus, on one level, typological predictions from the studies of negation are too specific, whereas in many others they are far too unspecific to provide testable hypotheses. For this reason, this book will have to have recourse to a more general level of typological principles. In particular, we shall go back to Greenberg’s classic Language Universals from 1966, which has a short section on negation, where Greenberg finds ‘evidence for the marked character of the negative as opposed to the positive’ (Greenberg 1966: 50), and to Croft’s exposition of Greenberg’s ideas in his Typology and Universals in particular his chapter on ‘Markedness in typology’ (Croft 1990: 64–94), where he repeats polarity as one of the basic categories where we can find patterns of markedness (Croft 1990: 93). These basic patterns will play an important role when we look at the very pervasive non-standard features that constitute the main part of this investigation. First of all, however, we shall have a brief look at the ways negation in standard English can be said to be marked in contrast to affirmative statements.

Markedness

English negation as a feature of morphosyntax should conform to the criteria for morphosyntactic markedness set out in Table 1.1.⁹

Standard English clearly conforms to markedness criterion S1: positive clauses are not marked explicitly by an ‘affirmation marker’, but by zero, whereas the negative clause is clearly marked by the addition of (at least) the negative morpheme not/-n’t, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 2, in many cases by the addition of an auxiliary do as well.¹⁰

Another criterion is also clearly fulfilled for standard English, the frequency criterion S8. Negative clauses are much rarer than their positive counterparts in general. Text counts vary considerably, but figures from my investigation suggest a ratio of between 1:7 and 1:10 for contemporary spoken English (one negative clause for ten positive ones), and the figure for written English must be considerably lower, as negation is known to be much rarer in writing than in conversation (for recent corpus-based figures, cf. Biber et al. 1999: 159ff., and cf. Chapter 9). The remaining two criteria, however, are not fulfilled: positive and negative paradigms of standard English verbs have an equal number of distinctions, and the positive paradigms are by no means more or less irregular than the negative ones. Strictly speaking, an equal number of distinctions does not constitute a counterexample to a markedness pattern: the exact definition is that the unmarked value has ‘at least as many distinct forms in the same paradigm’ (Croft 1990: 79) as the marked one. A counterexample is only constituted by a reversal of the expected order (in this case, more distinctions in the negative paradigm than in the positive one). We can say then that for standard English, negation is neutral with respect to the two criteria S2 and S5. It does fulfil criteria S1 and S8 and negation is thus clearly the marked member of the polarity pair affirmative–negative.

Table 1.1 Markedness criteria

This markedness pattern is one we shall have to bear in mind for the remainder of this book, especially when we compare non-standard systems with the standard English one. Markedness patterns are ultimately motivated by functional considerations. Ultimately, then, we want to suggest general typological principles in order to provide functional explanations for the new grammatical phenomena that are on the increase in non-standard English today. Ideally, taking into account general findings from typological studies will also help to specify in which way the English dialects can perhaps be said to behave more ‘naturally’ than their standard counterpart, for example in the sense of Mayerthaler (1988).

Data

In order to put such a comparative enterprise on a sound basis, the standard of comparison will have to be made explicit. This book therefore begins by looking at the syntax and morphology of negation in standard English today. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the relevant features of negation, as well as a brief historical description of the development of negation towards the standard of today, in order to provide a foil for the comparison with non-standard features discussed in the following chapters. The grammatical approach chosen is an ‘enlightened’ or ‘modern’ traditional one, mainly following Quirk et al. (1985). This has the advantage of providing surface descriptions within a minimally formal apparatus, which most readers will be familiar with from school grammars. This surface description will be sufficient for our purposes, as functional explanations (rather than grammar-internal explanations) will be sought for the investigated phenomena. However, developments in a generative framework will of course also be discussed where relevant. The emphasis throughout will be on ‘real’ English and wherever possible, actual rather than constructed examples have been used. For standard English, the main source of these examples is the relatively new resource of the British National Corpus (BNC). The BNC is a 100-million-word corpus of British English compiled in the early 1990s. Ninety per cent of the material comes from written sources, which can be expected to represent present day standard English. All examples that were taken from the BNC carry an identifying alphanumerical label (e.g. BM8 183 or CB1 1007) which consists of the text code (the first three digits) and the clause number in which the particular quoted item occurs. In this way, all examples can be retrieved easily and cross-checked.

For some phenomena of standard English, recent diachronic developments have been postulated. These will be investigated with the help of the following four one-million-word corpora that make such a comparison possible.

The Brown corpus (BROWN) is a corpus of written American English; it was compiled from 1961 material of several genres and comprises about one million words. Its British counterpart is the London/Oslo/Bergen corpus (LOB); it was compiled in exact parallel to the BROWN corpus and thus makes comparisons between British and American English possible, which in many cases may indicate diachronic developments. More recent versions of these corpora, again in exact parallel to the originals, have been compiled at Freiburg university in Germany from materials published in 1991. These are called the Freiburg Brown corpus (FROWN) and Freiburg L...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Negation in standard English
• 3 Regional Variation
• 4 Filling the gaps?
• 5 Negative concord
• 6 Ain’t
• 7 Third person singular don’t
• 8 Past tense BE
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography