This article was downloaded by: [Laurentian University]On: 04 October 2014, At: 13:34Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Journal of LinguisticsPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cajl20

‘Giving a Rat's’ about Negation: TheJespersen Cycle in Modern AustralianEnglishIsabelle Grace Burkea

a Monash UniversityPublished online: 08 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Isabelle Grace Burke (2014) ‘Giving a Rat's’ about Negation: The JespersenCycle in Modern Australian English, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34:4, 453-485, DOI:10.1080/07268602.2014.929085

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2014.929085

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation: TheJespersen Cycle in Modern AustralianEnglish*ISABELLE GRACE BURKE

Monash University

(Accepted 18 February 2014)

This study is an overview of the Jespersen cycle in casual spoken Australian English.The phenomenon of the Jespersen cycle of negation is well known: negative polarityitems (NPIs) such as French pas ‘step’ are recruited for emphasis and subsequentlyreanalysed as the negator, eventually triggering the old negator’s omission. Recently,efforts have been made to align developments in British and American English negationwith this model, such as Cheshire’s description of the punctual never (e.g. I never wentto school today) and Hoeksema’s investigation of the reanalysis of taboo NPIs such asjack all as negators. Some 4,982 tokens of negation in the Australian English corporawere examined to evaluate the tug-of-war between speakers’ pragmatic desires to avoidface-threatening negation and the necessity of maintaining functionality in the negator.

Keywords: Jespersen Cycle; Negation; Punctual Never; Taboo NPI; Australian English

1. Introduction to Negation and Background to its Major Theories

Imagine a language where speakers could not differentiate between sentences like thegun is loaded and the gun is not loaded.1 Negation is a ‘pragmatic universal’, somethingthat all languages require in order to be functional (Horn 1989). Equally, it is an area ofsyntax efflorescent with creativity, as expressions like I didn’t drink a drop or I haven’t

*I wish to thank Professor Kate Burridge for her support and guidance as my Honours supervisor at MonashUniversity and Professor Pam Peters of Macquarie University for granting me access to, and assistance with, theMacquarie Corpus. The receipt of a Monash University Jubilee Honours Scholarship and funding from MonashUniversity to attend ALS 2012 is gratefully acknowledged. I also would like to thank the editor and twoanonymous reviewers for their invaluable assistance in improving this paper.1 Based on Burke (2012), a version of this paper was presented at the Conference of the Australian LinguisticSociety held at the University of Western Australia in December 2012.

Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2014Vol. 34, No. 4, 453–485, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2014.929085

© 2014 The Australian Linguistic Society

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

got a brass razoo suggest. Such a messy hodge-podge of vital necessity and creative reininevitably means that negation and its development can be elusive for the linguist toneatly trap with a single theory or schema. It heralds back to the classic transmissionproblem discussed by Labov et al. (1968): how does such an important area of syntaxevolve and change across time while maintaining intelligibility?Unsurprisingly, given its importance, negation has been accorded a corresponding

amount of scholarship. Horn (1989: xiv) even likens it to the ‘fruit of Tantalus’,hanging ‘seductively … just out of reach’ of the eager linguist. One of the earliest andmost successful grabs for this fruit occurred in 1917, when the Danish linguist OttoJespersen released his seminal work on negation. Nearly 100 years later, his is still theprevailing model of negation change and it is his name that graces the ‘Jespersen cycle’of negation.2 The pattern that he described is simple: languages tend to move througha series of essentially three stages, in which there firstly was a preverbal negator,such as French ne, secondly a bipartite negator, which sat on either side of the verb, asin ne … pas, and finally, a postverbal negator, as in contemporary French pas.Jespersen’s schema for both French (examples (1)–(3) a), the most prototypical

example, and the parallel development in English (examples (1)–(3) b), is replicatedbelow (Jespersen 1917: 7–11). Examples (1) a and b demonstrate the first stage,examples (2) a and b the second stage, and finally examples (3) a and b the thirdstage. English departs from the more orthodox French cycle in examples (4) and (5),due to development of do-support in example (4) and subsequent phonologicalreduction of not to nt in example (5).

(1) a Jeo ne dis b Ic ne secge

I NEG say I NEG say

(2) a Je ne dis pas b I ne seye not

I NEG say NEG I NEG say NEG

(3) a Je dis pas b I say not

I say NEG

(4) I do not say

(5) I don’t say

The cycle has been attested across a number of different languages, with Romancelanguages leading the vanguard in terms of sheer volume of scholarship (e.g. Price1971; Posner 1997; Schwegler 1983, 1990). Germanic languages are not far behind,with German (Breitbarth 2009; Jager 2008), Dutch (Burridge 1993) and English(Mazzon 2004; Wallage 2008, 2012) all well-acknowledged members of Jespersen’scycle. Excitingly, the cycle has more recently been discovered further afield, in Welsh(Willis 2010) and Arabic and Berber (Lucas 2007). Given the typological gulf betweensome of these languages, this diachronic development is all the more remarkable.

2 This is not to say that Jespersen was the first to discover the cycle. As van der Auwera (2009: 42) explains,Meillet (1912) and the Egyptologist Gardiner (1904) (both cited in van der Auwera 2009) beat him to the punchby several years. Rather, Jespersen brought the cycle into popular linguistic thought, probably due to thebenediction of Dahl (1979: 88).

454 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Such extraordinary uniformity in an area of syntactic change must have someexplanation and Jespersen is the first to offer a basic version of what is now namedthe ‘Neg-First principle’. He comments on languages’ ‘natural tendency … for thesake of clearness, to place the negative first, or at any rate as soon as possible, veryoften immediately before the particular word to be negated (generally the verb)’(Jespersen 1917: 5). Essentially, Jespersen acted as a pioneer for the idea that negationis not an area where speakers should procrastinate; negators need to appear early toavoid confusion, or before the hearer’s attention wanders. However, we may questionJespersen’s formulation of the Neg-First principle: he provides only a handful oflanguages to support the claim and he appeals mostly to intuition. It also seemsunclear whether Jespersen is asserting that negators mostly come sentence-initially orpreverbally, or if he is supporting both claims.Fortunately Dahl (1979) enters the fray to firm up these intuitions, albeit several

decades later, with his classic study of negation patterns in 240 different languages in40 different language families. While Dahl’s is clearly a synchronic study and does notdirectly engage in negation ‘across time’ in the same manner as Jespersen, his workacted as an integral stepping stone to later thought on negation through its findingson the dominance of preverbal negation.3

Dahl concludes his study on an interesting prediction: that these languages whichnow have postverbal negation would demonstrate tendencies to ‘return’ to thedesirable preverbal position, citing Scandinavian languages (1979: 95). This addressesa curious criticism which Larrivée (2010: 2255) hides in a footnote: the Jespersencycle, as it originally stands, does not actually appear to be a cycle, but rather, ‘a linearprocess’, moving from preverbal to postverbal negation through the intermediatestage of bipartite negation.Dahl’s predictions proved to be accurate: Posner (1985: 180) discovered that

French Creoles in various areas are tending to move pas from the postverbal positionto the preverbal (e.g. je pas dis). Burridge (1993: 215) even explains the introductionof mandatory do-support in English as a sneaky tactic to move the negator directlybefore the main verb (though not the auxiliary).4

This leaves us with questions for the Jespersen cycle: why would any language wantto drift away from the easily comprehended preverbal negator of the first stage? Thisforms the basis for the next core debate of diachronic negation: we can essentiallybreak the explanations down into two different schools of thought—the ‘pull’ chainand the ‘push’ chain, as Breitbarth (2009: 85–87) suggests, akin to the chain shiftphenomenon in phonology.Jespersen (1917: 4) was an advocate for the ‘pull’ or ‘weakening’ approach, which

holds that the transition from preverbal to bipartite is due to the original preverbal

3 For more on word order typology and negation see Vennemann (1974), Payne (1985) and Dryer (1988).4 There is no universal agreement on the synchronic status of do not V. Ingham (e.g. 2006) considers thispostverbal negation, as it follows the finite verb.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 455

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

negator phonologically ‘weakening’ (reducing). He cites a fear of communicationbreakdown as being a factor:

The incongruity between the notional importance and the formal insignificance ofthe negative (often, perhaps, even the fear of the hearer failing to perceive it) maythen cause the speaker to add something to make the sense perfectly clear to thehearer. (Jespersen 1917: 5).

Jespersen explains that ne is ‘weakly stressed’ in the first place and is a ‘mere proclitic’(1917: 4–5). The negator does have such an important task that it intuitively seems asthough it should not be a phonological wisp; the need for something more substantialis what drives the ‘recruitment’ of a supporting postverbal element and its subsequentreanalysis. Meaning is in danger, and, as Hoeksema (2009: 19) cheerfully explains,‘negative polarity items to the rescue!’However, employing a solely ‘pull’ chain analysis is now deeply unpopular.

Evidence from both Greek (Kiparsky & Condoravdi 2006) and Arabic (Lucas 2007)demonstrates that phonological weakening is not a necessary precondition to elicitJespersen’s cycle, with both languages entering the bipartite stage with no phonolo-gical weakening. It is important to note here that these scholars—and critics of the‘pull’ approach in general—are not claiming that phonological weakening has noplace in the cycle. They are merely stating that phonological weakening does notcause the recruitment of a postverbal element: weakening does not initially trigger thecycle. Weakening may well occur after the recruitment of the postverbal element.What drives the push-chain account? Essentially, the inflationary nature of speakers,

as born exaggerators (see Dahl 2001). The ‘secondary’ element in the negativeconstruction starts its life as an emphasizer, until it is reanalysed and then pragmaticallybleached of all its ‘colourful’ and emphatic nature and it becomes a default negator. Anearly advocate for this approach is Burridge (1993: 201), suggesting that the preverbalnegator was weakened because of the negation function being taken over by these new,reinforcing upstarts—the weakening is an effect, rather than a cause. As Harris andCampbell (1995: 54–55) have noted, negation is an area of syntax that gives surprisingrein to speakers’ creativity, as can be evinced by expressions such as I didn’t drink adrop, or I don’t give a rat’s arse. Hoeksema (2009: 19) observes the ‘great need forexpressions to boost the rhetorical effect of negation’ and Schwegler (1990: 158) alsomentions a ‘constant and universal need for negative emphasizers’.All of this may lead to a deceptively black-and-white impression of the negative

cycle. Either the negator becomes so small that it is difficult to hear, setting speakerssuddenly scrambling for a replacement, or it is hurriedly cast aside in favour of flashynew postverbal expressions.5 While Jespersen was a staunch advocate of the ‘pull’

5 I have used the term ‘postverbal’ here to stress the position of the NPI. Postverbal expressions, minimizers, etc.are all negative polarity items (NPIs): polarity items are sensitive to the polarity of their environment, eitherpositive or negative. NPIs do not by themselves confer a negative value: the negative element is part of thecontext that allows the NPI, it does not form part of the NPI itself.

456 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

chain, in reality, most linguists prefer to recognize the complex interplay between theweakening of the preverbal negator and the reinforcing nature of the postverbalnegator and weight each approach according to specific stages and data in thelanguage under scrutiny. Willis (2010) even assigns push- or pull-chain explanationsto different time periods of Welsh and particular stages, as he finds appropriate.

1.1. Australian English and Parallel Studies

The core of this paper was inspired by the intriguing suggestion made by Jespersenhimself that the phonological and structural weakening of not to nt may trigger ‘somenew device of strengthening … required to remedy such reductions’ (1917: 11).Essentially, this study was a search for the Australian successor to the current defaultnegator nt.If phonological weakening has any meaningful impetus on moving the Jespersen

cycle from stage one to stage two, then this is certainly suggestive for English: Zwickyand Pullum (1983) categorize nt as an affix rather than a clitic, downgrading itsstructural strength. In rapid speech, the negativity of the auxiliaries can’t and won’t isoften indicated merely by a lingering nasal or vowel length, a process that Hopperand Traugott (2003: 157) vividly refer to as ‘cheshirization’, one of Matisoff’s terms—all that lingers of the Cheshire cat is its smile, as all that remains of the negative is thenasality of the vowel.6 Proponents of the ‘weakening’ approach would certainly belooking for renewal strategies for this tired old has-been, and, indeed, it seems thatthere are successors lurking in the shadows of non-standard language.Cheshire (1998) recently examined the state of negation in a non-standard dialect of

British English spoken by teenagers in the town of Reading in Berkshire, with interestingresults.7 Never was found to be frequently used as a simple negator: this use is oftendescribed as the punctual never and contrasts with universal temporal uses such asI never go to the footy on Saturdays: the punctual never refers to a ‘point’ in time, ratherthan a period in time. Cheshire’s example is reproduced below, in example (6).

(6) (J) Was that at school you made that?

(M) No, I never went to school today. (1998: 38)

Cheshire (1998: 30) is quick to note the desirable preverbal placement of the simplenegator never, as well as its emphatic value.8 But nonetheless standardizationintrudes, interrupting the phonological reduction of never to ne’er, as seen innineteenth century novels, and the simple negator use of never gains somewhat of astigma in spoken language. Cheshire makes a fascinating prediction, that ‘if theprocess of standardization had not intervened, we could expect the cycle to havecontinued, with never eventually replacing not as the conventional marker of

6 Hopper and Traugott discuss this more generally to prosody lingering on, but it is clearly applicable tonegation.7 See also Cheshire (1982: 51–71).8 Never also appeared in Old English as a simple negator (see Mazzon 2004).

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 457

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

negation, just as not replaced ne’ (1998: 31).9 Never was becoming phoneticallyreduced and the ‘emphatic’ force was being lost; if only standardization had notrudely interrupted, the perennial Nurse to grammaticalization’s Romeo and Juliet, wemay well have seen Jespersen’s cycle turn once more.However, it should not be concluded from Cheshire’s study that the use of this as a

preverbal past tense negator is restricted to teenagers in Reading. Kortmann andSzmrecsanyi (2004: 1186) rank it the number one non-standard morphosyntacticfeature across the 20 different varieties of English they surveyed, attested in anastounding 19. The more recent eWAVE website resoundingly demonstrates that thepunctual never is a feature found worldwide: indeed, it is rare to find a total absenceof this feature (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2011). Australia is no exception: eWAVEshows that the punctual never is ‘pervasive’ in Aboriginal English and Torres StraitCreole. Of particular significance here are Australian English (it is assumed here thateWAVE refers to the casual spoken variety rather than Standard Australian English,although this is ambiguous) and ‘Australian Vernacular English’, described asbeing spoken by men, particularly of a working class background (Kortmann &Lunkenheimer 2011). The feature is described in the latter two varieties as ‘neitherpervasive, nor extremely rare’.Non-standard British dialects are well-explored in this area, with three corpus-

based studies: Tottie (1991), Anderwald (2002) and Palacios Martinez (2011). Thislast study is of particular relevance here, as Palacios Martinez (2011) is concernedwith examining negation in teenage speech, paying particular heed to punctual neveras well as colourful negative polarity items such as fuck all.One particularly fascinating set of negative polarity items has not been investigated

in Australian English at all, although it forms a perfect ‘mini-Jespersen cycle’.Hoeksema (2009) explores these unique NPIs in American English: taboo terms. Hisexamples are replicated below, in example (7):

(7) (a) He didn’t tell me fuck all about the car

(b) He told me fuck all about the car. (2009: 20)

Hoeksema singles out the lack of a determiner in these expressions and the seeming‘inherent’ negativity as a sign of incipient grammaticalization, though he dismisses thepossibility of them becoming ‘non-emphatic’ or ‘default’ expressions simply due to theirinfrequency. He also notes that the absence of standardization in this area is perhaps areason for their popularity (2009: 20–22). We could compare this with never, wherescholars such as Cheshire claim that development was retarded by standardization.Anecdotally, Australian English has a wealth of these expressions, such as bugger all,

and a rich paradigm of nominal expressions can be found after I don’t give, such as arat’s (arse) or a toss. The preverbal negator pig’s arse has also enjoyed brief popularity.Indeed, these items have reached such saturation point that a campaign for educationreform in Australia has been named I Give a Gonski (www.igiveagonski.com.au), after

9 For more on standardization and grammaticalization, see Laitinen (2004) on Finnish.

458 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

the Gonski Review. Although it seems unlikely that bugger all could ever become anegator with no emphatic value whatsoever, Allan and Burridge (2009: 379) give anexcellent summary of the state of taboo terms in Australian English, particularly theirtendency to become ‘bleached’ with overuse in some contexts. In light of thecommunity’s evolving attitudes towards swearing (Allan & Burridge 2009: 381–383),it seems that Hoeksema’s universal dismissal may be premature.Where should we locate modern Australian English on the Jespersen cycle? What

sort of renewals could be observed? Should these be explained in terms of nt‘weakening’? These questions have not been answered in any unified manner. Neverappears to be popular, but the literature is mostly silent on the matter of taboo polarityitems. As taboo terms are clearly not an area governed by standardization, it seems thatthese could be highly popular emphatic negators and well capable of moving on thestage of not-dropping. Perhaps this could contribute evidence to Crystal’s (2006: 408)assertion that non-standard language ‘is achieving a new presence and respectabilitywithin society’, owing to widespread social changes contributing to the colloquializa-tion of language, combined with electronic communication.As van der Auwera (2009: 66) concludes his commentary on Jespersen’s cycle, ‘to

get the whole picture, we have to look at the whole world’.

2. Corpora and Methodology

2.1. The Corpora

As Sankoff (1982) has acknowledged natural and spontaneous conversation as thelocus for syntactic change, casual spoken Australian English has been used for thisstudy, rather than Standard Australian English.Three different corpora were analysed for this project. As Palacios Martinez (2011)

convincingly identifies the role of teenagers in negation change, the Griffith andMonash corpora were used. The Monash Corpus of Australian English (MCE) is acollection of transcripts of recordings and interview data of adolescents in Melbournein 1997, consisting of roughly 60 hours of audio. The Griffith Corpus of SpokenAustralian English (GCSAusE) is a collection of annotated transcripts and recordingsof students and staff at Griffith University in 2007, consisting of roughly four hoursof audio. An interesting feature of the Griffith corpus is that speakers initiated theirown recordings, without the inhibiting presence of the researcher. This is true foronly some of the recordings in the Monash corpus, with a large proportion of thetranscripts consisting of sociolinguistic interviews between researchers and theadolescents. For this reason, only the conversational transcripts were analysed.The Griffith and Monash corpora were accessed via the Australian National

Corpus (AusNC) website.10 The search engine built into this website returned only an

10 The metadata for the Monash and Griffith corpora do not include the total number of words. As this studydoes not focus on the frequency of negation, calculating this was not of particular import. The number of totalnegations, given for each corpus in the Results, gives an idea of the relative size of each corpus.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 459

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

entire transcript for key words. For example, a search for never in the Monash corpuswould return a list of all the transcripts that contained this term, but this did notidentify where it was in the transcript, or the number of tokens. The originaltranscripts and data files were downloaded and carefully read through. To preventhuman error, the Word search function has been used with a list of key words, whichwill be discussed below.The International Corpus of (Australian) English (ICE-Aus) has also been

analysed. This corpus is comprised of 60% speech and 40% writing, recorded from1992 to 1995, and consists of just over 1,000,000 words. Of the speech component,only the S1A transcripts have been analysed. The S1A transcripts consist of informalprivate conversation, just as the Griffith corpus. This creates a uniformity to the typeof data that have been analysed. Unlike the other corpora, the ICE-Aus corpus wasaccessed via the Macquarie University Corpus website. There is a sophisticated searchengine built into this website with the ability to define word boundaries, which sim-plified the extraction of negation. Importantly, this also permitted the total percentageof occurrences of certain NPIs in negative contexts (e.g. any and at all) to be cal-culated, with some being more prototypical members of this class than others (i.e.classic NPIs such as at all appear in negative contexts with a much higher frequencythan less typical members, such as any).Finally, all three corpora are freely available at <https://www.ausnc.org.au/>. In the

Results section, the name of each transcript is provided beside each example, inaddition to the line numbers, which enable the reader to cross-reference the examplewith the full transcript.

2.2. Methodology: Untangling the Nots

2.2.1. Defining the environments

The categorization of such a pervasive language feature as negation is no easy task.Fortunately, Pullum and Huddleston (2002) provide an excellent catalogue of con-temporary English negation, which despite being firmly grounded in StandardEnglish, creates the backbone for the schema used in this paper. Here we will brieflyinvestigate three main oppositions.The first is that of verbal and non-verbal negation, essentially a neater reformula-

tion of the classic not- and no-negation distinction. In verbal negation, the negator isgrammatically associated with the verb, whereas in non-verbal negation, the negatoris associated with a dependent of the verb. In the following examples, these are anadjunct (example (8a)) and an object (example (8b)), respectively.

(8a) Verbal negation

Mittens doesn’t bite

Mittens did not bite anyone

(8b) Non-verbal negation

Mittens never bites

Mittens bit no one

460 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

The second distinction is between analytic and synthetic negation. Analytic negatorsare words that have only one function: marking negation, such as not, or no, inresponse to a question. Synthetic negators, on the other hand, are multi-taskers andcan indicate functions other than negation, as can be seen in the following pair ofexamples.11 In example (3b), no has two different functions: not only does it expressnegation, but it also acts as the determiner in the noun-phrase structure, expressingquantification. Therefore it is a synthetic negator. Conversely, in example (9a), thetwo different functions are separated: not indicates the negation and any indicates thequantification. Therefore this is an analytic negator.

(9) a. Mittens does not have any fleas

b. Mittens has no fleas

The last main distinction is that of clausal and sub-clausal negation. These are termswhich have myriad synonyms, including nexal and special negation, dating back toJespersen (1917), and the perhaps more popular terms sentential and constituentnegation, used by Dahl (1979) and Anderwald (2002). This paper is only concernedwith clausal negation.Now that the key distinctions have been introduced, verbal negation can be broken

down further, into three categories. The first of these and the most prominent isprimary negation, associated with primary verb forms.12 Positive clauses containingthe primary forms of auxiliary verbs can be negated ‘directly’ (e.g. will not), butclauses containing the primary forms of lexical forms require the ‘dummy’ auxiliarydo in addition to the negator (did not). Primary negation can, of course, also bebroken down into analytic and synthetic negation.Here it must be noted that Pullum and Huddleston differentiate nt from not, as

primary synthetic negation uses nt and primary analytic negation uses not. As can beseen in Section 4.1, this is crucial for the conclusions drawn in this project and wasone of the core reasons that the Pullum and Huddleston classification system, whileelaborate, has been adopted here over the perhaps overly simplified not- and no-negation classification.Verbal negation can also be broken down further, into imperative negation and

secondary negation. Only primary verbal negation will be analysed in this paper.13

This creates three main categories of negation to be analysed: verbal primarysynthetic (nt); verbal primary analytic (not); and non-verbal synthetic (nobody,

11 It is important to note that this use of synthetic and analytic is unorthodox. Most scholars use ‘synthetic’ torefer to words composed of more than one morpheme, a use that would be appropriate for forms such ashaven’t, but not for forms such as no. I have adopted Pullum and Huddleston’s slightly unusual use of this termfor the sake of simplification.12 Primary negation is almost always clausal. Pullum and Huddleston (2002: 801) point out only one case inwhich it is sub-clausal, where the negated verb falls within the scope of a preceding adjunct (e.g. I often don’tanswer my phone).13 See Burke (2012) for the full breakdown of sub-clausal, imperative and secondary negation, as well as non-verbal analytic negation.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 461

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

nothing, etc.) Naturally, non-verbal negation can be sub-clausal, and it can also beanalytic; however, for the sake of simplicity one category will be analysed here.This simplified classification system of the various types and sub-types of negation

has created the ‘net’ in which this study can catch the negation used in the corpora.This is of importance to one of the central questions of this research: is AustralianEnglish holding steady at stage three of the Jespersen cycle, or is there blossomingrenewal? For instance, if we saw that the primary synthetic negation type (nt) wasbeing reinforced with much greater frequency than, for instance, synthetic non-verbalnegation types (e.g. nobody and nothing), this would lend weight to Jespersen’ssuggestion that the phonetically reduced nt is in need of ‘propping’ up by NPIs.

Schema 1: ‘Casting the net’: schema of the environments of negation

Verbal negation

Primary synthetic (nt)

Primary analytic (not)

Non-verbal negation

Synthetic (no, none, nobody, etc.)

2.2.2. Defining the targets: emphatic and non-emphatic negators and NPIs

Section 2.2.1 surveyed the possible environments of negation. However, somethingremains to be said on the form of the negators themselves and the various NPIs thatare of interest here. There has been one major division in this section: that betweenemphatic and non-emphatic negators and NPIs. This study is not concerned with adetailed foray into pragmatically defining the notion of emphasis: negators and NPIswere coded as emphatic or non-emphatic according to the literature discussed inSection 1. A large factor in determining whether an NPI was emphatic or not was if itwas obligatory: for instance, any was coded as non-emphatic because it is obligatoryto avoid multiple negation in certain environments. As has been discussed in theliterature, clearly an NPI ceases to be emphatic once it becomes obligatory.The curious and complex case of never also needs to be classified in a finely-grained

manner. As Cheshire (1985) describes, the default meaning of never is that of theuniversal temporal negator, or not ever. The sense is that of ‘not on any occasion’. Butthe case that is interesting from a Jespersen cycle perspective is that of the punctualnever, an alternant to didn’t; the use referring to a ‘point’ in time rather than a period intime. Importantly, this does not only have to be past time, as in I never went to schooltoday. It can also include a point in the future, as in you’ll never catch the 8:06 traintonight. Only in the punctual sense does never retain an emphatic function.In addition to these uses of never, following Palacios Martinez (2011: 22), categories

were included for the idiomatic expressions you never know and never mind, which donot comfortably fit within either category of universal temporality or punctual use.Never can also be emphasized by a following ever, which is also categorized here.Another category that is required under never is that of ‘ambiguous’. As Palacios

Martinez (2011: 22) admits, there are only two examples in which the point in the

462 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

past was explicitly mentioned in his corpora, despite 16.5% of the never he analysedbeing categorized as punctual. Despite the very best analysis of context, it is notalways possible to determine whether or not a never is punctual or universal: as willbe discussed in Section 4.2, this is crucial to its reanalysis.Two other popular ways of emphasizing negation involve the concept of the

polarity adjunct. Polarity adjuncts are either yes or no markers of positive andnegative polarity respectively, usually in answer to a question. They can stand alone,or combine with a clause, as in no or no I didn’t. The adjunct can also occur at theend of the clause, but only with prosodic detachment, as in I didn’t see that, no. Thesingle polarity adjunct is treated as emphatic negation here, as is the repeated polarityadjunct. The repeated polarity adjunct (no no no) is coded as emphatic in line withits treatment by Peters and Funk (2009: 230) as a ‘most basic way’ of intensifyingnegation. The single polarity adjunct is perhaps a more fuzzy case and it is difficult tocome down on either side of emphatic or non-emphatic, but intuitively sentencessuch as no, I don’t think so are reinforced more than sentences such as I don’t wantany. For the duration of the study it has been coded as emphatic.The last of the emphatic NPIs can be found in Schema 2, below, from examples

(10a–f).14

Schema 2: ‘Tigers in the net’: schema of the emphatic negators and NPIs

(10) Never

(a) Universal temporal (not an emphatic use)

(b) Punctual

(i) Past

(ii) Future

(c) Ambiguous

(d) You never know

(e) Never mind

(f) Additional ever

(11) No way*

(g) Reaction signal

(h) Integrated

(12) Unintegrated not*

(13) Multiple negation*

14 There are two emphatic negators and one emphatic construction type that are not discussed here (see Burke2012). They are included here merely to reveal what was coded as emphatic. The negators are no way, both as areaction signal (no way!) or integrated into clause structure (no way is that true!), and unintegrated not,associated with the speech of younger speakers, in which an emphatic not is added following a clause, retractingthe proposition in a humorous manner (I’m having a good time … not!). The emphatic construction is that ofmultiple negation (Mittens didn’t scratch no sofa). Multiple negation is too large a topic to be contained hereand, in any case, has already enjoyed its fair share of the limelight in terms of scholarship. The five instances ofmultiple negation found throughout the corpora were coded as emphatic (see Burke (2012) for argumentation).

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 463

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

(14) NPIs

(a) Taboo

(i) Negator present

(ii) Negator absent

(b) Even15

(c) At all

(d) Whatsoever

(e) A bit

(f) Idioms

(15) Repeated no

(16) Single no

The non-emphatic NPIs included in Schema 3 below (20a–f) are those discussedby Pullum and Huddleston (2002). Also included as a non-emphatic negator is the‘idiosyncratic’ case of dunno, which Palacios Martinez (2011: 29) categorizedseparately; this is to gain a more accurate picture of the total tokens of primarysynthetic verbal negations.16

Schema 3: schema of the non-emphatic negators and NPIs

(17) Ain’t*

(18) Don’t*

(19) Dunno

(20) Non-emphatic NPIs

(a) Any-series

(b) Yet

(c) Either

(d) Too

(e) Much

(f) Ever

2.3. Search Terms and Research Questions

The search terms used for the negators were ain’t, not, no, neither, never, and allforms of the modal and dummy auxiliaries (e.g. won’t and don’t) and forms such asnothing, nobody, no one, nowhere. The special transcription form dunno was alsoincluded. A number of idiomatic and taboo NPIs were searched for, in line with theextensive list in Hoeksema (2009), with the addition of the more Australian NPIbugger all. Because the ICE-Aus corpus allowed the quick retrieval of all tokens of

15 Even is perhaps a controversial category. Palacios Martinez (2011) treats it as an NPI, but it can also beconsidered an adverb. It certainly seems to hold a grain of emphasis; the statement that even modifies is oftenheld to be surprising in some manner, in comparison with a set of other statements (see Pullum & Huddleston2002: 594).16 Ain’t and invariant don’t are also not discussed here (see Burke 2012).

464 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

particular words, the total percentage of occurrences of certain NPIs in negativecontexts (e.g. any and at all) was calculated.The combination of different NPIs was problematic for coding. Frequently idioms

and NPIs such as any or even would be combined, but classifying all of these co-occurrences would not disclose anything particularly revealing. No separate categorywas provided for combined NPIs.At this point we must return to the central questions of this research. The first task

of this paper is to assess the general state of negation in Australian English and itsposition in the Jespersen cycle, by means of assessing the reinforcements that are usedwith certain negation types, particularly primary synthetic negation (nt). The secondissue is assessing the reanalysis of taboo NPIs. The third issue is the reanalysis ofnever.These three issues are those that can be assessed quantitatively (the latter two

issues to a lesser extent), in the following section, Results. However, the quantitativeaspect of this paper is intended to act as a background to Section 4, Discussion. Whilesome quantitative evidence is required for a general picture of the Jespersen cycle inAustralian English, arguably qualitative evidence is of more import here when one isconcerned with reanalysis: the contexts by which reanalysis enters the language canbe more revealing than sheer numbers.All three corpora are presented separately in the results. Originally it was assumed

that there might be a diachronic aspect to the reanalysis found in the corpora, asthere is a decade-long gap between the ICE and Monash corpora (1990s) and theGriffith corpus (2007). However, as it turned out, tokens of reanalysed taboo NPIsand clear-cut punctual never were rare. Given such low numbers, no meaningfulstatements about language change between the corpora can be made.17

3. Results

Tables 1–3 illustrate overall negation in all three corpora and the frequency withwhich negation types were reinforced, emphatically and non-emphatically.

Table 1 Griffith—negation reinforcement

Primary syntheticnegation

Primary analyticnegation

Non-verbal syntheticnegation (clausal only)

Unreinforced 303 60 31Reinforced (non-emphatic) 46 2 2Reinforced (emphatic) 56 6 12Total 405 68 45% emphatically reinforced 13.8% 8.8% 26.6%

17 For instance, reanalysed taboo NPIs were only found in the Monash corpus. However, as is discussed inSection 4.3, numerous examples have been found recently in the Australian media. One would not want to claimthat reanalysis was taking place in 1997 and then abruptly stopped before the Griffith corpus in 2007.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 465

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Tables 1–3 demonstrate that primary synthetic negation (nt) is not emphaticallyreinforced to any greater degree than any other category. Indeed, in the ICE corpus,perhaps a more stable vehicle in which to examine negation statistically due to itslarger size, nt-type negation was least likely to be emphatically reinforced. Table 4demonstrates the breakdown of never. Figure 1 is a percentage breakdown of never,illustrating the comparative rarity of the punctual use.18 Table 5 demonstrates thepopularity of the polarity adjunct no as an emphatic negator. Table 6 summarizesthe use of taboo NPIs in all corpora.19 Clearly register was a factor in the variation ofthe number of taboo NPIs between the corpora.Remarkably, either was found to be acting as a negator in ICE, on two occasions.

This was such a surprising find that this was compared with two other non-emphaticNPIs, any and anything, and two emphatic NPIs, at all and whatsoever (Table 7). Thetotal percentage of occurrences in negative contexts was calculated, in line withHoeksema’s reasoning that the more often an NPI occurs in a negative context, themore likely it is to be reanalysed.

Table 2 Monash—negation reinforcement

Primary syntheticnegation

Primary analyticnegation

Non-verbal syntheticnegation (clausal only)

Unreinforced 410 94 64Reinforced (non-emphatic) 48 5 4Reinforced (emphatic) 56 12 10Total 514 111 78% emphatically reinforced 10.9% 10.8% 12.8%

Table 4 All corpora—emphatic negator: never

Universal temporalnever (notemphatic)

Punctualnever(past)

Punctualnever(future) Ambiguous

Youneverknow

Nevermind

Neverever

Griffith 8 1 0 3 0 1 0Monash 21 1 0 1 2 0 0ICE 133 4 0 10 3 2 5

Table 3 ICE negation reinforcement

Primary syntheticnegation

Primary analyticnegation

Non-verbal syntheticnegation (clausal only)

Unreinforced 2169 430 338Reinforced (non-emphatic) 332 50 25Reinforced (emphatic) 280 86 51Total 2781 566 414% emphatically reinforced 10.1% 15.2% 12.3%

18 The other category comprises uses such as you never know, never mind, etc.19 The full breakdowns of the emphatic and non-emphatic NPIs can be found in Burke (2012).

466 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

4. Discussion

The results clearly demonstrate that Australian English is holding steady at our currentstage of the Jespersen cycle. Jespersen’s predictions on reduced nt needing reinforce-ment at some point were not carried to fruition here. Indeed, surprisingly enough, thephonetically ‘smallest’ type of negation, primary synthetic (nt), was the least likely to

Table 5 All corpora—emphatic negators

Unintegratedno way

Integratedno way

Unintegratednot

Multiplenegation

Singleno

Repeatedno

Griffith 0 1 0 0 5 10Monash 2 0 1 4 38 12ICE 15 3 0 1 172 132

Table 6 All corpora—taboo NPIs

Taboo NPI (with negator) Taboo NPI (acting as negator)

Griffith 3 0Monash 7 2ICE 0 0

Table 7 ICE: selected NPIs and their likelihood to appear in negative contexts

Either At all Whatsoever Any Anything

Total hits (repetitions subtracted) 81 74 2 217 171Acting as negator 2 0 0 0 0Primary verbal synthetic 28 36 2 84 74Primary verbal analytic 6 12 0 13 5Non-verbal 2 11 0 9 6Imperative 0 0 0 0 0Interrogative 0 5 0 4 4Sub-clausal 0 1 0 1 1Anaphoric 0 7 0 2 1% negative 46.91% 97.3% 100% 52.07% 53.21%

never (all corpora, N=196)

Universal Temporal

Punctual (3.1%)

Ambiguous (7.1%)

Other (7.1%)

82.7%

Figure 1 All corpora (Griffith, Monash, ICE)—never

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 467

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

be reinforced in the ICE corpora. From the literature, it was expected that aconstellation of colourful reinforcements would appear from the data, with perhapsone in particular taking the lead as a prime candidate for reanalysis. However, this wasnot the case at all: indeed, there were relatively few emphatic reinforcements at all.This section, in addition to Section 4.1, will examine why this may be, before movingon to specific cases of reanalysis (taboo NPIs, never and either).When negation was reinforced, speakers most commonly resorted to devices of

emphasis that are not syntactic. The two most common means of amplifying negativeswas by the simple polarity adjunct no and by repetition, via the repeated no no no. Whenspeakers were under pressure, elegant syntactic devices were put aside and repetitioncame to the fore, as can be seen in examples (21a) and (21b).20 In example (21a), speakerBH2 has been accused of recording the personal conversation that has just occurred andscrambles to deny it. This example is unusual in that the nt negator, didn’t, is repeatedthree times, rather than no, but this is also reinforced by a simple polarity adjunct. Thenegation is then further reinforced by the adverb even. In example (21b), the speakerpleas for good behaviour from Tony with repeated no supporting an imperative.

(21a)

465 BH2M: [did you record that shit that????]

466 BH2: [no I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t]

467 BH2M: [I didn’t say anything bad]

468 BH2: [no I didn’t even have it then] (MEBH2FB)

(21b)

S1A-090(B):205 Mmm no jokes No noises either Tony no no no don’t

The popularity of these two devices sheds some light on the absence of constructionssuch as the punctual never, or there being no signs of reanalysis of at all. Whenspeakers need to bolster a negative, the prime two means of doing this are notsyntactic at all. The polarity adjunct and pro-sentence no, repeated or not, shows nosigns of replacing more conventional means of verbal negation in the three corporaexamined (*I no did that). Indeed, outside L1 acquisition and pidgin and creolestudies, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which this could occur.Why are these rhetorical emphatic devices, the fodder for the Jespersen cycle, so

thin on the ground? It seems there are important pragmatic reasons for this, as will bediscussed in Section 4.1. However, there may be another explanation for the paucityof syntactic reinforcements—firstly, it could be argued that negation is not an area oflanguage that has a particularly high ‘turn-over rate’ (despite its creativity), incomparison to euphemism, for example. More importantly, Australian Englishappears to be following the ‘if it ain’t broke’ approach to negation: there already isa negator that works perfectly well emphatically—not, often expanded from nt.

20 A reviewer has pointed out that repetition does not necessarily entail emphasis, as it occurs frequently in thestops and starts of everyday conversation: intonation would be a larger clue to its emphatic value. This is indeedtrue, but unfortunately it was not feasible to look at the intonation contours of each repeated no, particularly asaudio was not always available.

468 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

The formality value of expanding nt into not is well-known, from linguists toschoolchildren writing essays. However, it is significant that speakers can detach ntand use its original full form not only for formality, but also for emphasis. Numeroustimes throughout the corpora, particularly the Monash corpus, where speakers wereyounger (and perhaps more argumentative), the inflectional negative was abandonedin favour of its analytic form when the speaker was attempting to prove a point to theinterlocutor. Example (22a) is particularly interesting, as speaker CG1M variesbetween wasn’t and was not as he grows keener to win the argument over how closehe was to crashing the family car. Example (22b) is similar.

(22a)

619 CG1M: wasn’t really

620 CG1MFa: it was.that was.it was shuddering

621 CG1M: ah.Dad thinks like it was really full on off-road but

622 it’s like a teeny-weeny

623 CG1MFa: it was full on I can tell you

624 CG1M: it was not@trust me (MECG1MA)

(22b)

184 CG1MFa: but they were very nice staff there

185 CG1M: they were not

186 CG1MFa: they were.oh, they were in the restaurant (MECG1MA)

This is attested with a wide range of the negative auxiliaries. In example (22c),note that cannot and can’t are even used within the same utterance, the analytic formclearly preferred for embellishment. Tellingly, in example (22e), speaker N appears toimmediately repair the use of don’t, using the analytic form do not for emphasis.

(22c)

54 F: >I think it’s the other way around though< to speak

55 to the store mana[g]er

56 A: [I] (.) I ↑can↓not see how they can’t just

57 (.) I don’t know what’s going on (.) it’s really

58 frustrating. (GCSAusE05)

(22d)

3 M: I cannot↑sta:nd Mr. Glazebrooke= (GCSAusE21)

(22e)

89 N: =and so- still some people

90 just don’t know do not know. (GCSAusE21)

Another interesting use of this construction is pseudo-disagreements. In example(22f), the speaker is clearly not really disagreeing with the interlocutor. Yaeger-Dror(1997: 6) even discusses this precise type of ‘superficial disagreement’ being used as a‘supportive interchange’, referring to the example no, you’re not fat.

(22f) [I’ve got a fat stomach]

S1A-022(B): 88 You have not you’re just obsessed by that stomach of yours

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 469

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

This leads us to a large reason why no particular emphatic negation strategy has taken offin Australian English. As van der Auwera (2009: 42) argues, a large part of the meteoricrise of pas in French was due to the shortcomings of ne as both a neutral and anemphatic negator. Van der Auwera holds that while ne remained perfectly fine forneutral negation, it was too weak for emphatic negation, which is why it needed formaland semantic strengtheners, as can be seen in the examples (23)–(24) below.

(23) Je ne veux PAS!

I NEG want NEG

‘I do NOT want it!’

(24) *Je NE veux

I NEG want

*‘I doN’T want it’. (van der Auwera 2009: 47)

The preceding set of examples (22a–e) demonstrates that not still has the capacity toact as an emphatic negator in Australian English: nt can be detached from the verband prosodically stressed whenever the speaker requires. Consequently, it seems thatnt does seem to work as both a neutral and an emphatic negator: speakers recognizethe relationship between the synthetic and the analytic form and vary between themwhen required. Perhaps one reason that Australian English is showing no clear signsof developing a new emphatic negator is that it already has one: not (at least in thisenvironment). Given that its ancestor nawiht ‘nothing’ was used for emphasis in OldEnglish, thousands of years past, not demonstrates remarkable longevity as a negator.

4.1. ‘I Didn’t Wanna Like Bag It Before’: Redefining the Jespersen Cycle

Linguists have often puzzled over the reduction of negators. The role of emphasis andsubsequent pragmatic unmarking in the Jespersen cycle is well understood (e.g.Kiparsky & Condoravdi 2006; van der Auwera 2009; Willis 2010). However, theliterature gives the impression that the other side of the cycle (when indeed phoneticerosion does play a part) is a mystery. Why do speakers systematically erode suchcritically important information? An air of bewilderment prevails in commentariessuch as Hoeksema (2009: 19): ‘If negation is so important, and clearly it is, why wouldone want to reduce it at all? Ease of articulation is certainly not of such paramountimportance that speakers should let it prevail over the clarity of their message’.It is a fact often overlooked in the development of negation that there are certain

aspects of language more important than clarity. The historical linguist occasionallygives the impression that speakers should be bellowing out their disagreement,prosodically stressing the negator and seasoning every sentence with NPIs. While it isimportant to distinguish between utterances such as the gun isn’t loaded and the gunis loaded, frequently negation is a delicate speech act. At its core, it conveysdisagreement. It is hard to imagine an utterance such as no way, that dress doesn’t suityou one bit. In all likelihood, Neg-raising and adverbial attenuators would be used;I’m not really sure that suits you.

470 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Yaeger-Dror (1997) excellently surmises the problem. She describes negation andits contraction (nt) as a tension between the Cognitive Prominence Principle and theSocial Agreement Principle. Yaeger-Dror cites a wealth of phonetic studies showingthat discourse-new information is pitch-prominent and there is increased vowelduration, something which roughly corresponds with contraction. This is theCognitive Prominence Principle: negatives are uncontracted when they are conveyingimportant new information. However, there is an important addendum: this is incareful contexts, such as sentence reading, or in instructional contexts, where theclarity of the message is paramount.In conversational speech, a different principle is active: the Social Agreement

Principle. As Yaeger-Dror (1997: 3) argues, in ordinary speech, there is a preferencefor agreement: speakers wish to minimize signs of disagreement with theirinterlocutors and amplify signs of agreement. This even has application in recentdevelopments in English negation, that of the discourse particle yeah-no, described byBurridge and Florey (2002). In her corpus studies of American English, Yaeger-Dror(1997: 4) found that in interactional speech, the vast majority of negatives werecontracted whenever possible. Although one could argue that is intimately tied up inthe formality of primary verbal analytic negation (the I do not type), it was also foundthat negatives were also rarely pitch-prominent.Yaeger-Dror (1997: 6) introduces a three-way distinction between neutral, remedial

and supportive negatives. Remedial negatives, in which another interlocutor initiatesa repair, are face-threatening acts and they are ‘strongly dispreferred’ by the SocialAgreement Principle, contracted whenever possible (1997: 6). On the other side of thespectrum are supportive negatives: the negative is not contrastive or exciting or new,but it is socially supportive, buttressing the preceding statement of the interlocutorand actually expressing agreement. The Cognitive Prominence Principle wouldpredict that supportive negatives such as these should be non-contracted, but thisis frequently not the case: they are ‘significantly more likely’ to be prominent(1997: 7).This all demonstrates that when the negative is not face-threatening, it often clings

to its prominence. But Yaeger-Dror (1997: 7) goes further and argues thatinteractionally neutral negatives, even when these convey new and importantinformation, are often contracted and non-prominent. Yaeger-Dror attributes thisto the speaker’s uncertainty about the hearer’s opinion on the matter, which doesseem to be a contributing factor, but clearly well-understood mechanisms like ease ofarticulation are also at play here. Language, as Langacker (1977: 106) describes it, is ‘agigantic expression-compacting machine’.Consequently, the primacy of the Social Agreement Principle in conversational

contexts causes some trouble for the Jespersen cycle. Speakers are keen to mitigateany signs of disagreement by morphologically reducing negation, not only when thisis face-threatening, but likely also in neutral contexts, to avoid giving offence. Indeed,it seems as though the only context in ordinary conversation when prominentnegatives are acceptable is when they do not signal disagreement at all, in the ‘no,

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 471

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

you’re not fat!’ type construction. The same principle is not as paramount ininstructional or more formal settings, but this is irrelevant: spontaneous conversationis the vehicle for syntactic change and it is being ‘blocked’ from gaining strongernegators for pragmatic reasons.It seems as though the Social Agreement Principle is a key factor in the stability and

robustness of nt-type negation in all three corpora and the modest number of renewals.Obviously, pitch-prominence and non-contraction cannot be perfectly aligned and thisdoes create some problems for this conclusion. The main discrepancy is that negativescan be contracted and the entire negative auxiliary is stressed. When analysing corpusdata of this size, however, it becomes impractical to code for so many variables, as doestracking the conversational context in which negation occurs. When such a largeamount of data is required to study syntactic change, some trade-offs are inevitable.Nevertheless, there were several instances of victories of the Social Agreement

Principle throughout all three corpora. In example (25a), speaker T is careful to hedgehis dislike of Townsville, knowing that speaker B has visited it. This could beinterpreted as a face-threatening negative, but could also be neutral, as speaker T isunsure of speaker B’s feelings on the matter. In line 182, speaker T begins with a brazennot, but hurriedly self-repairs and mitigates the disagreement, using didn’t. In line 184,he further hedges his negation with that fond, the conversation in possession of acertain tension before speaker B admits I didn’t like it either, in line 185. From thenonwards, the negation ice has been broken and both speakers are more comfortablewith less contracted negatives. Speaker T in line 195 uses there’s not that much there,the use of auxiliary contraction over negative contraction a less mitigated form ofdisagreement, but this is still curtailed by that much. In line 197, once bothinterlocutors are certain they are in agreement, speaker B uses the most straightforwardnegation of the discussion, the non-verbal synthetic form nothing, reinforced by no.

(25a)

180 T: =hhhh (0.7)

181 I’ve-(.) I’ve been to Townsville

182 ↑not-(0.2) I did[n’t ↓real]ly::- (0.2)183 B: [Yeeh::]

184 T: wasn’t that fond of it=

185 B: =I didn’t like it either

186 [I didn’t like Townsville]

187 T: [hhhhh ha ha]

188 I didn’t wanna like ba:g it before

189 you were like ↑oh yeah I

190 loved it [.h h it] was fun. (0.6)

191 B: [a ha ha]

192 T: ↓sorr:y::=

472 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

193 B: =yeah:, (0.7) I didn’t like it it’s

194 too↓:,(1.2) yeah ↑too boring (.)

195 T: there’s not much the:re (.)

196 it’s [like-]

197 B: [↑No] there’s nothing198 the:re (GCSAusE11)

In example (25b), speaker L is discussing being turned down for a date, a topic thatperhaps requires some sympathy and sensitivity on the part of the hearer. In a displayof what Cheshire (1998: 46) describes as ‘syntactic harmony’, the use of the samesyntactic construction when a conversation is proceeding harmoniously, speaker Gechoes the negator no one. Aside from the meshing of negators, speaker G is mostlikely using a supportive negative, agreeing with speaker L’s assertion that no one isthat busy to have a drink, thus licensing the fuller non-verbal synthetic form. Giventhat the topic requires a little care, it is likely that the previous use of no one byspeaker L then ‘permitted’ its use for speaker G.

(25b)

140 L: I didn’t wanna: have (.) a date (.) on Thur-

141 Tuesday ‘cause I didn’t have any money so I said

142 can we do it Thursday an’ he said nah (.) busy

143 (1.1) we can do it next week an’ I’m like >yeah

144 whatever< (2.6) no one’s that busy (1.5) to have

145 a drink like °for fuck’s sake° (2.9)

146 G: ↑WHAt (1.4) no one’s that busy= (GCSAusE14)

The reader is also referred to example (22f). The full analytic form have not is used,although this is not cognitively focal information at this stage in the conversation.How should we explain the use of analytic negatives in examples (22a–b), in

conversational contexts that were clearly face-threatening? Does this detract from thepragmatic explanation of nt-dominance? It seems not: Yaeger-Dror (1997: 24–25)mentions a puzzling facet of the written fiction data in her corpus, in which face-threatening negatives were not contracted. She concludes that these negatives wereportraying childhood arguments between peers, whereas most corpus data are ‘polite’ and‘non-intimate’ (1997: 24). Clearly, arguments are situations in which the SocialAgreement Principle is effectively neutralized, as examples (22a–c) have shown. Indeed,these kinds of negatives seemedmore popular in theMonash corpus, where conversationswere most commonly between teenage peers. Nevertheless, the ‘I did not!’ type negativewas evinced in all three corpora: the following is another example from ICE:

(25c) [I said oh right and he said oh he said they forced me into eating a

piece of cake]

S1A-021(A):122 Oh I did not

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 473

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

These data suggest the need for a reimagining of the two camps of thought onmotivating the Jespersen cycle. Rather than ‘mysterious’ structural reduction warringagainst speakers’ desire for exaggeration, a better statement would be that speakers’pragmatic needs for agreement need to be weighed against their desire for creativityand functionality.

4.2. Punctual Never

An unexpected finding of this study was the infrequency of punctual never. This is aprominent feature of non-standard British English and its importance to the conceptof the Jespersen cycle has been discussed in the literature (e.g. Cheshire 1998, 1985,1982). Palacios Martinez (2011: 21) found that 16.3% of never in his corpora werepunctual and similar numbers were expected here.However, as Figure 1 illustrated in the Results section, clear-cut punctual never was

only observed in 3.1% of cases. Even if we were to conflate the ambiguous categorywith definite cases of punctual never, this would not approach the numbers observedby Palacios Martinez (2011). This could be considered broadly in line with theinformation provided by eWAVE that the punctual never is ‘neither pervasive norextremely rare’ in Australian English, but it was certainly rarer than might beexpected (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2011). The rarity of the construction couldperhaps be attributed to the size of the corpora: examining syntactic change workingthrough a language requires very large amounts of data.Nevertheless, the emphatic nature of never was clearly observed throughout all

three corpora. Not … ever was comparatively much rarer, as has been observed in theliterature: never is seen as a stronger marker of negation (Cheshire 1998: 34; PalaciosMartinez 2011: 21). Even when never was unambiguously of the universal temporalsort, it could clearly be interpreted as emphatic, as example (26a) shows.

(26a)

S1A-047(A):37 It was case study work where you write case studies up places

that you’ve never been to and never seen and people you’ve never spoken to

Never ever was one method of strengthening negation, appearing five times in ICE-Aus, therefore appearing in similar numbers to punctual never in terms of absolutetokens. This seems to contribute to the conclusion that repetition and polarityadjuncts are the most popular ways of reinforcing negation in Australian English,with the functionally desirable redundancy it brings. Example (26b) is a case in point:it could be fairly described as involving some repetition.

(26b)

S1A-092(A):263 I never never never ever have ever don’t think I’ve ever

served ice cream for dessert once

There was only one clear-cut example of punctual never in the Griffith corpus, but itis striking. In example (27a), speaker H is explaining how her employer, Shirl, deniedthat she received her phone-call explaining that she could not come to work. The

474 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

time reference, today, is set in line 20. The rhetorical flavour is pronounced,juxtaposed as it is with the adverb obviously.

(27a)

20H: >what happened is I told shirl I couldn’t work today n she

21 forgot bout it n blamed it on ↑Me<

22 (0.6)

23D: mmm.

24H: <parently didn’t happen: it’s my word against Hers (0.7) so

25 she’s obviously right [(0.9)] NeverHAPpened it’sall

26D: [hhh]

27H: in my hea:d. (GCSAusE19)

ICE-Aus provided four tokens of punctual never, three of which are examined here,in examples (27b–c). The time specifications in the following three examples areexplicitly set, although interestingly, these could perhaps be interpreted as temporalnever, as the periods of time are long enough to permit the alternant didn’t ever.

(27b)

S1A-036(B): 156 Really I dislocated one of my toes and I think I dislocated my finger last year

but I never went to the doctor about it

(27c)

S1A-075(A): 237 Like in year ten we mum and I discussed it but um it never got done

(27d)

S1A-093(A): 3 Yeah I had a few things due in the last week which I never got round to doing

The ambiguity of some instances of never has been noted in the literature, particularlyin Cheshire (1998: 45), when she notes that it is ‘not always clear whether [never] isused as a straightforward negative or whether its temporal meaning comes into play’.However, Cheshire does not link these contexts to the reanalysis of temporal never topunctual never. It seems as though these fuzzier and more subtle tokens are the key tothe reanalysis of the ‘not on any occasion’ never as an emphatic simple negator, analternant of didn’t. While Cheshire (1998: 33) notes that never is more acceptable in‘indeterminate’ periods of time, even citing an instance from Tolkien’s The Hobbit, shedoes not explicitly identify these contexts as the site for syntactic reanalysis.At this point it is useful to return to the canonical description of reanalysis. Harris and

Campbell (1995: 72) describe the conditions necessary for reanalysis as the following:

a subset of the tokens of a particular constructional type must be open to thepossibility of multiple structural analyses, where one potential analysis is the oldone (applicable to all tokens) and the other potential analysis is the new one(applicable to a subset)

The ‘indeterminate’ period of time, where the hearer must return to a previous clauseto understand the time reference, if indeed it is ever made explicit, seems to be thelocus of reanalysis here.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 475

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Four tokens of ambiguous never in ICE-Aus involved a certain type of verb, eitherthink or figure out. These can be paraphrased with I didn’t ever think of that, but also byI didn’t think of that, if the time reference is compressed enough. A foray into AusNCcould not confirm that these are punctual never, but it is important to realize theambiguity that is present here. You can say that you have never thought of thatwhen youare sitting before an exam paper for an hour and are discussing the answers with a friendafterwards, or you can say that you never thought of that when asked if you consideredswitching to an engineering degree throughout your three years as an Arts student.Overall, the minimal presence of punctual never in these three corpora was

unexpected. This does not seem to be a form that is highly stigmatized andprescriptive pressure is not a convincing explanation for its absence. Indeed, thepunctual never seems to lead a ‘double life’, acting as a prestigious construction whenused in literature. It may well be that the punctual never is simply in its nascent stagesin Australian English, reanalysis slowly occurring for some speakers in contextswhere time frames are not specified and permit both a punctual reading and a ‘not onany occasion’ reading. It does seem that certain verbs seem to be more propitious forpunctual never, such as get around to. However, the extension from these contexts tomore frank time frames (e.g. I never went to school today) is less evident, at least inthe selected corpora here, which restrains any concrete conclusions that never hasindeed been reanalysed as an emphatic simple negator.

4.3. Not Every Negator Requires an Apology to a Bishop: Taboo NPIs and TheirReanalysis

The Monash and Griffith corpus suggest that a distinction needs to be made betweentwo types of constructions involving taboo NPIs. The first is the I couldn’t give a type,which has the ring of an idiomatized construction, with any number of colourfullexical items permitted within this paradigm. Anything from rat’s arse to a fig to ahoot can appear in this slot. At no point was the nt negator dropped in theseconstructions, which seems to be in analogy with the preservation of nt in the Icouldn’t care less construction. It would be very interesting to examine these frames inAmerican English, in which some speakers have reanalysed less as the negator anddropped nt (I could care less).21

Palacios Martinez (2011: 16–17) observed that these haven’t got a constructions arepopular among teenagers, but not among adults. This was a conclusion certainlyborne out through the Monash and Griffith corpus, with nine tokens of theconstruction. This construction was so well known that in example (28) the tabooitem could be omitted, with only a suggestive silence.

21 This is a popular linguistic bugbear for speakers of American English and the subject of furious argument onthe internet.

476 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

(28)

259 CG1MP1m: we’re not joking you know, you can take us to the

260 health department, we reallydon’t give a

261 CG1M: do you know Spotless Catering? never hire them at Monash

(MECG1MB)

The other type of taboo NPI construction is the haven’t got shit type. Hoeksema(2009: 20–21) observes that these constructions do not have a determiner, somethingthat is unusual for a minimizer. Usually speakers are keen to emphasize the smallnessof the amount to which they are referring, as in expressions like one bit; determinersare helpful in achieving this. Hoeksema also adds that these are mass nouns, which isunusual. A typical example of the construction is given in example (29a).

(29a)

348 BH2F: [[IDENTIFYING MATERIAL REMOVED]’s got a present for her]

349 BH2M: [I haven’t got shit! I don’t even know who it is]

(MEBH2FB)

Hoeksema (2009: 21) comments that the absence of determiners are ‘exceptionalfeatures’ that allow these constructions to ‘split off from the pack’. This is anobservation that needs to be further teased out. Example (29b) provides a good startto this process. Speaker BH4MFa is the teenage subject’s father, originally fromManchester, and he unusually collocates any with jack all. The audio file confirmsthat any and jack all are on the same intonation contour and there is no evidence ofperformance error. Indeed, any is strongly stressed. The audio file also confirms thatBH4MFa speaks with a British accent, which does detract somewhat from theramifications of this for Australian English.

(29b)

305 BH4MFa: every Sunday and I’ve always bought him some special

306 treats. Chocolate. this Sunday I didn’t have oh I did I gave

307 him ninety cents and said what can you get for ninety cents

308 BH4M: you can’t get shit all

309 BH4MFa: stormed round the shop kicking everybody in the shop

310 shouting you can’t get any jack all for ninety cents. what an

311 awful father you are (MEBH4MA)

The presence of any is a strong indicator that reanalysis has not taken place inexample (29b). Jack all is still treated as though it belongs in the lexical domain ratherthan the grammatical one—it seems little different to examples like you can’t get anylollies. It also provides a strong contradiction to the claim made by Hoeksema (2009:21) that the reanalysis of taboo NPIs as negators takes place in varieties of Englishwhere non-standard multiple negation is the norm, given that the any-series is used,rather than you can’t get no jack all. This is a point that will be further examinedshortly.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 477

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Excitingly, there were two tokens of reanalysed taboo NPIs acting as negators.These were shite all and jack all, both in the same transcript, but belonging todifferent speakers, outlined below in examples (30a) and (30b).22 Speaker three isinterrupted by an unknown party in line 125, but this does not detract from theevidence of reanalysis.

(30a)

119 ? yeah now we’ve got this new roster system at the moment,

120 that’s working. we’ve had it for about the um last few weeks

121 ?: not really my brother doesn’t do anything

122 4: that is exactly what I do I feel I do noth. my sister does

123 nothing

124 3: yeah I know my sister does

125 ?: my sister never does anything

126 3: shyte all

127 4: [it’s because they’re younger]

(30b)

144 4: so it’s so you reckon it’s not it’s kinda not fairly shared?

145 3: yep definitely

146 ?: not really

147 4: do you end up doing all the work or does your mum or what?

148 3: nah, oh well my sister does nothing my mum does a fair bit

149 .<cough> I do a fair bit. dad does a lot too

150 ?: yeah

151 4: my sister does jack-all. so your family’s pretty fair?

(MECG4MB)

These two speakers have reanalysed the taboo NPIs shite all and jack all as negators,which permits the omission of the negator nt. This is strikingly similar to rotations ofthe Jespersen cycle across the world. This reanalysis also has interesting implications forthe Jespersen cycle as a whole: as observed by Hoeksema (2009: 22) an NPI does notneed to be obligatory before it can be interpreted as a negator, a matter that has oftenbeen debated (e.g. van der Auwera 2009) Moreover, we could strengthen this statement:the NPI does not even need to be common before it is reanalysed. This particular frameonly occurred five times, and all tokens were found in the Monash corpus.At this point we need to return to Hoeksema’s enticing remarks on the ‘exceptional

features’ of these constructions. It is worth comparing this reanalysis to another exampleof syntactic change commonly found in Austronesian languages, in which possessiveconstructions are reanalysed as benefactive constructions (Margetts 2004). Austrone-sian languages rarely have determiners, but when they do, in languages such as Vera’a,spoken in Vanuatu, this seems to slow down the progression of the benefactive reading.This is an explanation for both of these occurrences: determiners are a nagging

22 The audio confirms that the vowel in this collocation is pronounced [ai], as the transcription suggests.

478 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

reminder that an item is lexical and this impedes the reanalysis. An important factor initems becoming more grammatical is their re-categorization into a more closed class ofitems (e.g. Harris & Campbell 1995). As lexical items become more grammatical, thisoften triggers the loss of features that signify it as, for example, a noun. In cases such asbugger all, this process is facilitated by the absence of a determiner: there is one less steprequired for reanalysis and this makes it a more attractive prospect.The process of reanalysis and extension is so messy that it can be difficult to

determine the relationship between multiple negation and taboo NPIs. Utterancessuch as that is example (30a) may be because the speaker has not reanalysed shit as anegator, or it may be because the speaker has indeed reanalysed this and ismaintaining negative concord between nt and shit. However, there was certainly noclear-cut evidence in the Monash corpus that there is a relationship between multiplenegation and taboo NPIs acting as negators.23

This was an area of the study which highlighted the shortcomings of exclusivelyusing corpus data: although there were only two instances of the reanalysis in theMonash corpus, over the past few months this construction has appeared many timesin the media. For instance, the Australian Weekend Magazine had a feature on 22–23September on the Deni Ute Muster. Bilton (2012) interviewed farmer Brad Smith,who said the following: ‘I’d rather be earning stuff-all and doing something I lovethan getting paid 150 grand a year for sitting in a truck’. This was an interesting caseof a euphemism being used in the construction, which suggests the original issufficiently well-known that a ‘softened’ version is required.Philip Adams (2012) also used the construction in the Australian Weekend

Magazine on 6–7 October: ‘I bought a toaster from Woolies. Home-brand, made inChina. Only to discover that the Chinese, for all their wisdom and the marvels oftheir regional cuisines, know bugger all about toast’. Although this is an orthographiccomment and not of crucial linguistic import, it is worth mentioning that a hyphenwas used with the previous example and not with Philip Adams, which seems toindicate a certain newness and uncertainty to the written form of the construction.The construction was also mentioned in The Age Odd Spot on 28 May:

A British priest has apologised to his bishop for using the f-word on his Facebookpage. Canon Paul Shackerley’s Facebook post read: ‘I think I will put my feet up.I’ve done f— all today other than jazz lesson and visit a friend. I hear the fizz oftonic in my gin beckoning. (2012)

At this point, it is worth returning to Section 4.1: pragmatic constraints are clearly inplay with this negator. After all, it is not every day that a language scrounges up anegator that requires an apology to a bishop.

23 Although introspective data are not particularly useful for grammatical change, it is worth mentioning that Ifind constructions such as I don’t know bugger all ungrammatical. This has a strong ring of negative concord andI would always drop the negator, which suggests that I have reanalysed the NPI. A brief survey of friends andfamily indicates a similar phenomenon.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 479

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

4.4. ‘Either Did She’: A Surprising Reanalysis

Hoeksema (2009: 26) argues that NPIs such as any and ever are unlikely toundergo reanalysis as negators because of the environments in which theyappear.24 Indeed, it seems it would be hard to reinterpret items like any as negativequantifiers if the bulk of their occurrences were in positive sentences. For the mostpart, this was a suggestion that ICE-Aus substantiated: for instance, the any-itemshovered around 50% and they were not reanalysed.This is where the biggest surprise of this study emerged: either. ICE-Aus showed

that this NPI occurred in negative environments an underwhelming 46.91% of thetime: this is even less likely to be reanalysed than any. But, astonishingly, it wasindeed reanalysed as a negator in two instances, examples (31a) and (31b).

(31a)

His mother from America

I didn’t even know he was American

No Neither did I

He doesn’t have a an accent

No Like noticeable)

S1A-028(A):221 Well either did she So maybe she moved top

(31b)

(I haven’t got the money to go

Yeah You’re coming

Come on

Don’t be stupid)

S1A-083(B):243 Either’ve I25

These examples are remarkable. Either was not coded as an emphatic NPI in the resultsand indeed it does not seem as though either is emphatic in the same way as expressionssuch as I haven’t got a clue are. When a speaker requires the use of a disjunctive dual intheir utterance, it seems impossible to avoid using either. This seems to detract from theassumption in the literature that the Jespersen cycle is always driven by the process ofemphatic inflation, then subsequent pragmatic unmarking. The overall pattern appearsto be the same: expressions such as I didn’t know either are reanalysed, the ‘wrong’ item,either, taken to be the exponent of negation and the negator nt dropped. The inherentlynegative value of either is made apparent in both examples (31a) and (31b) because theyclearly negate sentences in their own right.Even more curiously, either already has a neg-incorporated partner, neither.

Neither is even used as a negator a few lines before either in example (31a):the reanalyses seem as strange as though ever was taken to be the negative partner

24 Hoeksema uses this as evidence for the reanalysis of taboo NPIs, but this is unconvincing. The syntactic statusof many expletives is unique: for example, bloody and fucking can act as infixes (abso-bloody-lutely). It certainlydoes not seem as though they are tightly restricted to negative contexts.25 A careful reading of the transcript reveals that the speaker is responding to the interlocutor’s earlierstatement, I haven’t got the money to go.

480 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

over never. There are only two elements of either that seem to suggest its uniquenessas an NPI: firstly, it triggers subject–verb inversion (*Either I did). Secondly, neither isa rather special negator, as it is the only environment in which multiple negation isstill permitted in standard English (I liked neither the curtains nor the carpet) and theonly environment in which ‘non-standard’ multiple negation endured in theeighteenth century (I didn’t like it neither) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008).I propose that this reanalysis is motivated by the stigmatization of negative concord.

The use of two negatives is so undesirable that speakers are beginning to eradicate this inutterances even in which this is ‘standard’ and accepted. The reanalysis must take placein environments such as I liked neither Hawthorn nor Sydney, in which nor is taken to bethe negator. Speakers then take neither to be an NPI, not carrying any negative value(because this would cause the dreaded multiple negation). Correspondingly, either istaken to be the negative partner of the either–neither pair in a form of hypercorrection.Given that neither is also used as a negator in example (31a), this must be a reanalysisthat has taken place with very few speakers.26

5. Conclusion

It seems that Australian English presents several ‘surprises’ in its negation renewals,just as Zwicky and Pullum (1983: 502) suggest is possible with grammatical researchinto a language as well-known as English. The conservatism that surfaces from theGriffith, Monash and ICE-Aus corpora in terms of renewals was unexpected andprovides a point of contrast with the parallel developments observed in modernBritish English, particularly the punctual never.I have argued that the small number of reinforcements and the general

conservatism found here is due to two factors. Firstly, nt has the ability to bestructurally detached and returned to its full particle form not and prosodicallystressed. This means that it is functional both as a neutral and an emphatic negator,which according to the theory advanced by van der Auwera (2009: 42), reduces theneed for renewal. This claim has been motivated by data across all three corpora ofthe ‘I did not!’ type structure. Secondly, there is a principle at play in conversationalcontexts, the vehicle for syntactic change, which hinders the development of renewals.In order to mitigate the force of disagreement, morphological reduction is preferredin face-threatening and, quite often, neutral contexts, in parallel with discoursedevelopments such as yeah no (Burridge & Florey 2002).The Social Agreement Principle and its importance in negative contraction, as

outlined by Yaeger-Dror (1997), suggests the need for a re-evaluation of the two mainschools of thought on the Jespersen cycle. The motivation for emphasis and subsequentpragmatic unmarking is well understood, but the phonetic reduction side of the cycleremains opaque in the literature. What possible reason do speakers have for eroding

26 As rare as this construction may be, it appeared in a family friend’s letter only days after the original versionof this paper was presented: ‘I am pleased that everything went well in Perth and it sounds like you both had agood time over there. Either Harry or I have been there at all’ (personal communication, 2012).

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 481

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

such valuable information? The answer lies in pragmatic concerns. A more usefulconception of the Jespersen cycle would involve a tug-of-war between speakers’pragmatic desires to avoid face-threatening negation and the necessity of maintainingfunctionality in the negator. Negators need to be morphologically large enough to befunctional, but small enough to be non-threatening. Clarity and creativity clashesagainst politeness concerns and in ‘stable’ time periods of the Jespersen cycle, such ascontemporary Australian English, it seems that the latter is winning out.The reanalysis of punctual never appears to be in its nascent stages. This paper

argues that indeterminate time periods, or time periods which are large enough topermit both readings of didn’t or didn’t ever, are the locus of reanalysis of punctualnever. This construction remains emphatic and comparatively rare in the Griffith,Monash and ICE corpora, although time will tell if the reanalysis will proceed to thefrequency of British English, or even to a later stage when the construction isunmarked and it loses its grain of universal temporal meaning.The reanalysis of taboo NPIs as negators has taken place in Australian English,

although the small number of tokens observed in the Monash corpus is contradictedby the numerous recent examples in the Australian media. It seems as though this isanother case of the perennial problem of corpus data: a gap does not imply that aconstruction does not exist. However, the two tokens of this construction being in theMonash corpus is in line with the assertion that teenage speakers are the vanguard ofsyntactic change (Palacios Martinez 2011). This reanalysis has significant implica-tions for the Jespersen cycle: in line with Hoeksema (2009), it means that NPIs do notneed to be obligatory before they are reanalysed. Moreover, the small number oftokens suggests that even frequency is not a requirement for reanalysis.The absence of a sturdy relationship between multiple negation and this reanalysis

presents some problems for the claim made by Hoeksema (2009) that the former isrequired for the latter. Given that linguists cannot see reanalysis before its extensioninto new contexts, it may well be that while some speakers maintain negative concordbetween the ‘real’ negator and the reanalysed NPI negator, others simply use the twotogether because the reanalysis has not yet occurred. Conversely, speakers that havereanalysed items such as bugger all as negators may immediately drop the ‘negatorproper’ as soon as the NPI has attracted an inherently negative value, in order toavoid multiple negation, something that is highly stigmatized in Australian English(Peters & Funk 2009). This is a possibility that Hoeksema (2011) has explicitlymentioned himself, in reference to Anglo-Norman and Middle English.This paper also argues that the reanalysis of taboo NPIs takes place within only one

particular frame. This is because the presence of a determiner in the I couldn’t give aframe inhibits reanalysis, as it is a reminder of the more lexical status of items such asjack all. An important part of lexical items becoming more grammatical is their re-categorization into a more closed class of items: the second frame has already takenone step into re-categorization, as the determiner is absent.The reanalysis of either was one of the surprises to emerge from this study and is

thoroughly deserving of further attention, given its implications for the role of

482 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

emphasis in reanalysing NPIs as negators. I have proposed here that either may bereanalysed in environments such as I liked neither Hawthorn nor Sydney and ismotivated by the deep stigmatization of negative concord in Australian English, inthis case even filtering down to contexts where it is in fact standard.As always, sometimes the ‘fruit of Tantalus’ eludes the linguist. A plea for a greater

sample size may seem a trite observation, but when constructions are as infrequentand idiomatic as reanalysed taboo NPIs, it becomes critical. As much ‘art’ as thelinguist can make from corpus data and as many merits as this type of non-intuitivedata provide in gaining an overall picture of grammatical structures, more profoundconclusions could be drawn from more tokens. Although Anderwald (2002: 9)criticizes the use of questionnaires in grammatical research and mentions thedifficulty of eliciting certain constructions, the use of intuitive data would beinvaluable to further study of the reanalysis of taboo NPIs. Questionnaires miningintuitions on the meaning of constructions such as I didn’t do bugger all work on mythesis would provide fresh insight into the murky relationship between negativeconcord and the dropping of the original negator.

References

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at https://www.ausnc.org.au/, theAustralian National Corpus.

Adams P 2012 ‘Got my fingers burnt’ The Weekend Australian Magazine 6–7 October.Allan K & K Burridge 2009 ‘Swearing’ in P Peters, P Collins & A Smith (eds) Comparative Studies

in Australian and New Zealand English: grammar and beyond Amsterdam: John Benjamins.pp. 361–387.

Anderwald L 2002 Negation in Non-standard British English USA: Routledge.Bilton R 2012 ‘Heart of the nation’ The Weekend Australian Magazine 22–23 September: 7.Breitbarth A 2009 ‘A hybrid approach to Jespersen’s cycle in West Germanic’ The Journal of

Comparative Germanic Linguistics 12: 81–114. doi:10.1007/s10828-009-9027-7Burke I 2012 “Giving a rat’s” about negation: the Jespersen Cycle in Australian English Unpublished

Honours thesis, Monash University, Clayton.Burridge K 1993 Syntactic change in Germanic: aspects of language change in Germanic with

particular reference to Middle Dutch Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Burridge K & M Florey 2002 ‘“Yeah-no he’s a good kid”: a discourse analysis of yeah-no in

Australian English’ Australian Journal of Linguistics 22: 149–171. doi:10.1080/0726860022000013166

Cheshire J 1982 Variation in an English Dialect: a sociolinguistic study Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Cheshire J 1985 ‘“Never” and the problem of where grammars stop’ Polyglot 6: A3–A18.Cheshire J 1998 ‘English negation from an interactional perspective’ in I Tieken-Boon, van Ostade I,

G Tottie & W van der Wurff (eds) Negation in the History of English Berlin: Walter deGruyter. pp. 29–54.

Crystal D 2006 ‘Into the twenty-first century’ in L Mugglestone (ed) The Oxford History of EnglishOxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 394–413.

Dahl O 1979 ‘Typology of sentence negation’ Linguistics 17: 79–106. doi:10.1515/ling.1979.17.1-2.79Dahl O 2001 ‘Inflationary effects in language and elsewhere’ in JL Bybee & P Hopper (eds)

Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp.471–480.

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 483

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Dryer M 1988 ‘Universals of negative position’ in M Hammond, E Moravcsik & J Wirth (eds)Studies in Syntactic Typology Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 93–124.

Harris AC & L Campbell 1995 Historical Syntax in Cross-linguistic Perspective Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Hoeksema J 2009 ‘Jespersen recycled’ in E van Gelderen (ed) Cyclical Change Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins. pp. 15–35.

Hoeksema J 2011 ‘Looking at middle English through the mirror of Anglo-Norman’ in P Larrivée &R Ingham (eds) The Evolution of Negation: beyond the Jespersen cycle Berlin: Walter deGruyter. pp. 165–177.

Hopper P & E Traugott 2003 Grammaticalization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Horn L 1989 A Natural History of Negation Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Ingham R 2006 ‘On two negative concord dialects in early English’ Language Variation and Change

18: 241–266. doi:10.1017/S0954394506060121Jager A 2008 History of German Negation Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Jespersen O 1917 Negation in English and Other Languages København: Munksgaard.Kiparsky P & C Condoravdi 2006 ‘Tracking Jespersen’s cycle’ in MJ Janse & A Ralli (eds)

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and LinguisticTheory Patras: University of Patras. pp. 172–197.

Kortmann B & K Lunkenheimer 2011 Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE)Available at: http://www.ewave-atlas.org/ accessed 13 December 2013.

Kortmann B & B Szmrecsanyi 2004 ‘Global synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation inEnglish’ in B Kortmann, K Burridge, & R Mesthrie (eds) A Handbook of Varieties of English:Vol II: morphology and syntax Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 1142–1202.

Labov W, UWeinreich & MHerzog 1968 ‘Empirical foundations for a theory of language change’ in WLehmann & YMalkiel (eds) Directions for Historical Linguistics Austin: University of Texas Press.pp. 95–188.

Laitinen L 2004 ‘Grammaticalization and Standardization’ in O Fischer, M Norde & H Perridon(eds) Up and Down the Cline: the nature of grammaticalization Amsterdam: John Benjamins.pp. 247–262.

Langacker R 1977 ‘Syntactic reanalysis’ in C Li (ed) Mechanisms of Syntactic Change Austin:University of Texas Press. pp. 57–139.

Larrivée P 2010 ‘The pragmatic motifs of the Jespersen cycle: default, activation, and the history ofnegation in French’ Lingua 120: 2240–2258. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.001

Lucas C 2007 ‘Jespersen’s cycle in Arabic and Berber’ Transactions of the Philological Society 105:398–431. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.2007.00189.x

Margetts A 2004 ‘From implicature to construction: emergence of a benefactive construction inOceanic’ Oceanic Linguistics 43: 445–468. doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0009

Mazzon G 2004 A History of English Negation Harlow: Longman.‘Odd spot’ 2012 The Age 28 May.Palacios Martinez M 2011 ‘The expression of negation in British teenagers’ language: a preliminary

study’ Journal of English Linguistics 39: 4–35. doi:10.1177/0075424210366905Payne J 1985 ‘Negation’ in T Shopen (ed) Language Typology and Syntactic Description Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. pp. 197–242.Peters P & Y Funk 2009 ‘No in the lexicogrammar of English’ in P Peters, P Collins, & A Smith

(eds) Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: grammar and beyondAmsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 225–243.

Posner R 1985 ‘Post-verbal negation in non-standard French: a historical and comparative view’Romance Philology 39: 170–197.

Posner R 1997 Linguistic Change in French Oxford: Oxford University Press.Price G 1971 The French Language: present and Past London: Edward Arnold.

484 I.G. Burke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Pullum G & R Huddleston 2002 ‘Negation’ in G Pullum & R Huddleston (eds) The CambridgeGrammar of the English Language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 785–849.

Sankoff D 1982 ‘Sociolinguistic method and linguistic theory’ in J Cohen, J Los, & H Pfeiffer (eds)Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science Amsterdam: North Holland. pp. 677–689.

Schwegler A 1983 ‘Predicate negation and word-order change: a problem of multiple causation’Lingua 61: 297–334. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(83)90001-3

Schwegler A 1990 Analyticity and Syntheticity: a diachronic perspective with special reference toromance languages Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade I 2008 ‘The codifiers and the history of multiple negation in English, or,why were the 18th-century grammarians so obsessed with double negation?’ Studies inLanguage and Communication 73: 197–214.

Tottie G 1991 Negation in English Speech and Writing: a study in variation San Diego: AcademicPress.

van der Auwera J 2009 ‘The Jespersen cycles’ in E van Gelderen (ed) Cyclical Change Amsterdam:John Benjamins. pp. 35–73.

Vennemann T 2014 ‘Topics, subjects and word order’ in J Anderson & C Jones (eds) HistoricalLinguistics Amsterdam: North Holland. pp. 339–376.

Wallage P 2008 ‘Jespersen’s cycle in Middle English: parametric variation and grammaticalcompetition’ Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics 118: 643–674.

Wallage P 2012 ‘Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history ofEnglish’ English Language and Linguistics 16: 3–33. doi:10.1017/S1360674311000268

Willis D 2010 ‘Motivating the emergence of new markers of sentential negation: the case of Welshddim’ Diachronica 27: 110–156. doi:10.1075/dia.27.1.04wil

Yaeger-Dror M 1997 ‘Contraction of negatives as evidence of variance in register-specific interactiverules’ Language Variation and Change 9: 1–36. doi:10.1017/S0954394500001770

Zwicky A & G Pullum 1983 ‘Cliticization vs inflection: English nt’ Language 59: 502–513.doi:10.2307/413900

‘Giving a Rat’s’ about Negation 485

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

3:34

04

Oct

ober

201

4