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Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

What it is about

The paper compares three ways of negating a clause with an indefinite: not-negation (I didn't have any money), no-negation (I had no money) and negative concord (I didn't have no money). The data are spoken, from informal conversations in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford. Two syntactic accounts are tested: Account 1 applies Zeijlstra's agreement theory to all three variants, and Account 2 derives no-negation by movement from inside the noun phrase. Tokens are coded for verb type, verb complexity and discourse status, and analysed with a chi-square test and a mixed-effects logistic regression. The variant frequencies differ across the three places (chi-square 26.64, 4 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001). No-negation is most frequent with existentials and with be and have, and rare with lexical verbs.

Ideas

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 27. Negation (the three variants) and 08. National varieties (regional variation). The code is the polarity part of prag and prag/src/frames.rs. The measures: variant counts by verb class, the chi-square statistic, and the agreement of the discourse coder with a hand-coded sample.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.287

@article{childs2017integrating,
  title = {{Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English}},
  author = {Childs, Claire},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.287},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287}
}

References

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  68. How to cite this article: Childs, Claire. 2017. Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 106. 1–31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287 ↗ our card
  69. Submitted: 31 October 2016 find
  70. Published: 14 December 2017 find
  71. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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