Date: 19-Mar-2010
From: Christopher Lucas <cbl23 cam.ac.uk>
Subject: The Development of Negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic
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Institution: University of Cambridge
Program: PhD in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2009
Author: Christopher Lucas
Dissertation Title: The Development of Negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic
Dissertation URL: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/cbl23/research.html
Linguistic Field(s):
Historical Linguistics
Language Family(ies): Afroasiatic
Dissertation Director:
David Willis
Dissertation Abstract:
This thesis discusses diachronic developments in the expression of
negation in Arabic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, focussing in
particular on the set of changes known as 'Jespersen's Cycle' -
prototypically the progression from preverbal to bipartite to postverbal
negation - as well as the development of indefinites in the scope of
negation. Drawing together data on negation from a number of
neighbouring varieties of Arabic and Berber, as well as from Coptic and
Modern South Arabian, this thesis defends from a linguistic and
historical point of view the claim that bipartite negation in Arabic was
triggered by contact with Coptic in Egypt, and separately with Modern
South Arabian in Yemen and Oman, and that the same construction in
Berber was in turn triggered by contact with Maghrebi Arabic. In light of
the lack of an existing model of the psychological mechanisms which
enable contact-induced grammatical change, as opposed to the
sociolinguistic factors which constrain it, an account of these
mechanisms is developed, integrating Van Coetsem's (1988, 2000)
work on this topic with research on second language acquisition and
first language attrition, as well as with acquisitionist approaches to
(internal) change in general. This then enables an explicit account of
the spread of bipartite negation in the languages under study. This
account sees the bipartite construction in Arabic as the product of
imposition (source-language agentivity) by native speakers of Coptic
and Modern South Arabian, and its counterpart in Berber as the result
of borrowing (recipient-language agentivity) by native Berber speakers
from their second-language Arabic. The partial and complex
progression from a bipartite to a postverbal negative construction in
Palestinian Arabic is then examined in detail on the basis of original
field data, in a case study of phonological input to syntactic change.
Finally, the scope is widened to investigate a number of Jespersen-
type developments in the Semitic and Cushitic languages of Ethiopia,
as well as the development of n-words and negative indefinites in
Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic, Maltese and Hebrew, where it is
argued that, contrary to initial impressions, only the latter two have
developed into bona fide negative concord languages.
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