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| Title: | Never Again: The Multiple Grammaticalization of Never as a Marker of Negation in English |
| Author: | Christopher Lucas |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff65469.php |
| Institution: | University of London |
| Author: | David W. E. Willis |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/staff/dwew2 |
| Institution: | Cambridge University |
| Linguistic Field: | Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics |
| Subject Language: |
English
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| Abstract: | In both standard and nonstandard varieties of English there are several contexts in which the word never functions as a sentential negator rather than as a negative temporal adverb. This article investigates the pragmatic and distributional differences between the various non-temporal uses of never and examines their synchronic and historical relationship to the ordinary temporal quantifier use, drawing on corpora of Early Modern and present-day British English. Primary focus is on (i) a straightforward negator use that in prescriptively approved varieties of English has an aspectual restriction to non-chance, completive achievement predicates in the preterite, but no such restriction in nonstandard English; and (ii) a distinct categorical-denial use that quantifies over possible perspectives on a situation. Against Cheshire, it is argued that neither of these uses represents continuity with non-temporal uses of never in Middle English, but both are instead relatively recent innovations resulting from semantic reanalysis and the semanticization of implicatures. |
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This article appears in English Language and Linguistics Vol. 16, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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