Negation in Early English

A thorough overview and novel analysis of changes to negation, integrating insights and methods from several subfields of linguistics. This book uses statistical techniques and linguistic corpora to track language change. It will be ideal reading for researchers and graduate students in linguistics and the history of English.

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Informed by detailed analysis of data from large-scale diachronic corpora, this book is a comprehensive account of changes to the expression of negation in English. Its methodological approach brings together up-to-date techniques from corpus linguistics and minimalist syntactic analysis to identify and characterise a series of interrelated changes affecting negation during the period 800–1700. Phillip Wallage uses cutting-edge statistical techniques and large-scale corpora to model changes in English negation over a period of nine hundred years. These models provide crucial empirical evidence which reveals the specific processes of syntactic and functional change affecting early English negation, and identifies diachronic relationships between these processes.