Date: 10-Sep-2008 From: Amel Kallel <amelkallelhotmail.com> Subject: The Lexical Reanalysis of N-words and the Loss of Negative Concord in Standard English E-mail this message to a friend
Dissertation Director:
Prof. Anthony Warner
Prof. Susan Pintzuk
Prof. Anthony Kroch
Dr. Richard Ingham
Dissertation Abstract:
The Loss of Negative Concord (NC) has long been attributed to external factors. This study re-addresses this issue and provides evidence for the failure of certain external factors to account for the observed decline and ultimate disappearance of NC in Standard English. A detailed study of Negation in Late Middle and Early Modern English reveals that the process of decline of NC was a case of a natural change, preceded by a period of variation. Variation existed not only on the level of speech community as a whole, but also within individual speakers (contra Lightfoot 1991). A close study of n-indefinites in negative contexts and their ultimate replacement with Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in a number of grammatical environments shows that the decline of NC follows the same pattern across contexts in a form of parallel curvature, which indicates that the loss of NC is a natural process. This study reveals that the decline takes place at the same rate in all observed contexts. A context constancy effect is obtained across all contexts indicating that the loss of NC is triggered by a change in a single underlying parameter setting. Accordingly, a theory-internal explanation is suggested. N-words underwent a lexical reanalysis whereby they acquired a new grammatical feature [+Neg] and were thus reinterpreted as negative quantifiers, rather than NPIs. This lexical reanalysis was triggered by the ambiguous status of N-words between [+Neg] and [-Neg] and thus between single and double negative meanings. This change is treated as a case of parameter resetting as this lexical reanalysis affected a whole set of lexical items and can thus economically account for the different observed surface changes.
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