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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 languages/en/27-negation.md (the three variants) and languages/en/08-national-varieties.md (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}
}

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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 ↗