Variation and Change in English Negation: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective Claire Childs Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Newcastle University January 2017 Abstract Although negation is a linguistic universal (Dahl 1979; Horn 2001: xiii), the ways in which it is expressed are highly variable within and across languages (Miestamo 2005; de Swart 2010: 245). This thesis focuses on this variation in English, using corpora of informal conversations recorded in Glasgow (Scotland), Tyneside (North East England) and Salford (North West England) to study three variables: 1. Not-/no-negation and negative concord e.g. I don’t have any money / I have no money / I don’t have no money 2. Non-quantificational never and didn’t e.g. I never saw / I didn’t see that programme last night 3. Negative tags e.g. It’s a nice day, isn’t it / int it / innit? This research aims to bridge the gap between two typically distinct sub-fields of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and formal linguistic theory. The investigation draws upon formal theory in (i) defining the linguistic variables and their contexts; (ii) generating hypotheses to test using the spoken data; and (iii) interpreting the results of the quantitative variationist analysis in a theoretically-informed manner. The analysis takes a comparative approach (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001) to examine whether the factors conditioning negation are subject to regional differentiation. The results demonstrate that all three variables are most significantly constrained by internal factors such as verb type and lexical aspect. Although the relative frequency of variants always differs across geographical space, the underlying system is the same. Discourse-pragmatic factors apply consistently for the not/no/concord and never/didn’t variables, whereas the negative tags are more variable in this regard and are sensitive to social and situational factors. These different strands of evidence together provide support for particular theoretical accounts of how variants are derived from the grammar (not/no/concord) and how they have grammaticalised over time (never/didn’t and negative tags). Acknowledgements I would firstly like to thank the three members of my supervisory team. I am incredibly grateful to Heike Pichler for her mentorship and moral support, as well as the valuable meetings we have had about coding, statistics, discourse-pragmatic variation, and more. I am also immensely grateful to Karen Corrigan for her helpful advice, constructive feedback and her continual support and encouragement throughout my studies. I would also like to thank Anders Holmberg for his guidance and the many interesting discussions we have had about syntactic theory. I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) North East Doctoral Training Centre, including their funding for conference attendance and my period of study abroad at the University of Toronto. I would like to thank the staff and postgraduate students in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, the Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Postgraduate Research Training Programme who have supported me at Newcastle University. Thanks are especially owed to Danielle Turton for her encouragement and her expert advice on statistics and phonetics, as well as Joel Wallenberg for his insightful suggestions relating to the syntax of negation. I am also grateful to Joel and the other members of staff who have given feedback on aspects of my work as part of my Annual Progress Reviews, namely Gosia Krzek, Hermann Moisl, Maggie Tallerman and Jennifer Thorburn. My time studying abroad at the University of Toronto during the infamous winter of January to March 2014 was one of the highlights of my PhD. Special thanks go to Sali Tagliamonte for being so welcoming and guiding me as my supervisor while I was there. I also thank Bridget Jankowski for her assistance in the Sociolinguistics Lab, Aaron Dinkin and his LIN1256 class (Marisa Brook, Hannah Coulter, Derek Denis, Shayna Gardiner and Ruth Maddeaux) for the many thoughtful insights into ‘Deconstructing the Linguistic Variable’, and Chris Harvey for our chats about negation. Academic matters aside, I made some great friends in the department and I thank you all for making the experience even more enjoyable. I am very grateful to the researchers who allowed me to use their corpora as part of the research presented in this thesis. Jane Stuart-Smith generously granted permission for me to access the Sounds of the City corpus and I am thankful for her advice on using the materials. I also thank Brian José for his help with the corpus metadata. Karen Corrigan and the DECTE team kindly allowed me to use the Tyneside recordings and I also thank Adam Mearns for his assistance with sourcing the files and relevant information about the speakers. Thanks are owed again to Heike Pichler for allowing me to use the Research in Salford English corpus. These three corpora were rich sources of data and I am by extension grateful to the people who took part in the recordings. I would like to extend my appreciation to the audiences at my conference presentations for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the following scholars who have helped to answer queries or have provided helpful suggestions relating to my research over the years: Isabelle Buchstaller, Derek Denis, Mercedes Durham, Daniel Johnson, Laurel MacKenzie, Nick Roberts, Jennifer Smith, Cathleen Waters and Hedde Zeijlstra. My friends both in and outside academia have always been very supportive and I thank them for their encouragement. Special thanks go to Joanne Bartlett who has been so positive and reassuring. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my brother Chris for his continued support and always offering a helping hand to resolve difficult technological issues. I am also lucky to have such supportive and encouraging parents and I thank them enormously for everything that they have done for me. Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................. i List of Tables ........................................................................................................ v List of Figures .................................................................................................... vii List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................ viii Transcription Conventions ................................................................................. x Chapter 1. Introduction and Background ....................................................... 1 1.1. Overview of thesis ......................................................................................................... 1 1.2. The nature of linguistic negation ................................................................................. 1 1.3. Perspectives on linguistic variation ............................................................................. 6 1.3.1. Formal syntactic theory 7 1.3.2. Variationist sociolinguistics 8 1.4. Advantages of a variationist approach to language variation and change which integrates formal syntactic theory ............................................................................ 9 1.4.1. Defining the linguistic variables and the variable contexts 10 1.4.2. Testing hypotheses in spoken language data using qualitative and quantitative methods 13 1.5. The comparative method ........................................................................................... 15 1.6. Examining the role of both linguistic and external factors in language variation and change................................................................................................................. 15 1.7. Research questions ..................................................................................................... 16 1.8. The linguistic variables studied in this thesis ........................................................... 18 1.9. Overview of thesis ....................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 2. Data and Analysis ......................................................................... 23 2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 23 2.2. The localities and their varieties ............................................................................... 23 2.2.1. Glasgow 25 2.2.2. Tyneside 25 2.2.3. Salford 26 2.3. The corpora and samples ........................................................................................... 27 2.3.1. Glasgow: Sounds of the City corpus 28 2.3.2. Tyneside: The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) 29 2.3.3. Salford: Research on Salford English (RoSE) Corpus 31 2.3.4. The final sample and cross-corpus comparability 32 2.4. Dependent variables, variable contexts and extracting tokens .............................. 33 2.5. Selecting and coding independent variables ............................................................ 35 2.5.1. Linguistic factors 36 2.5.2. External factors 36 2.6. Qualitative analysis ...................................................................................................