Identifying the Role of Pragmatic Activationin Changes to the Expression of English Negation
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Phillip Wallage [1]
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[1] Northumbria University
Northumbria University
Reino Unido
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- Localización: Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives / coord. por Pierre Larrivée, Chungmin Lee, 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-17463-1, págs. 199-227
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This paper builds on Wallage (2013) to demonstrate that pragmatic activation plays a role in two processes of grammaticalisation in early English—not only in the grammaticalisation of the negative marker not during Middle English (c. 1100–1500AD), but also in the grammaticalisation of do as a tense marker in Early Modern English negative clauses (c. 1500–1700AD). While competing variants are semantically equivalent, different variants are used to mark differentpragmatic functions. Innovative forms tend to appear in pragmatically activated (discourse-given) propositions and older forms in inactivated (discourse-new) propositions. Logistic regression analyses of diachronic data provide a way to identify pragmatic changes in progress, and hence to ascertain what role the lossof functional constraints on a form plays in its grammaticalisation. van der Auwera (2009), Hansen (2009) and Hansen and Visconti (2009) argue that pragmatic change precedes the grammaticalisation of the French negative marker pas. They argue this accounts for its increased use over time. However, the overall frequencies of not and do increase despite pragmatic constraints on their use remainingconsistent over time. Instead, pragmatic constraints on not and do are lost at the point when the forms are grammaticalised—that is, when the competitors to not and do are lost.
