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Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 12:2 (2019) ► pp.290–318

Vernon never called for me yesterday

A study of never as a marker of negation in the English of London adults and teenagers

| University of Santiago de Compostela

This paper investigates the different readings and meanings of never in the speech of London adults and teenagers, with particular attention to cases in which this negative is equivalent to a sentential negator in the past. The analysis of a sample of over 2,000 tokens extracted from three main corpora serves to provide not only a qualitative perspective on this issue but also a quantitative one that presents new empirical evidence. The universal negative quantificational use of never is seen to be the most frequent while punctual never comes second. The data analysed also indicate that in the last few years there has been an increase in such uses of this negative compared to the early 1990s. However, no notable differences are attested in this respect when contrasting adult and teen speech.

Keywords: London English, never , non-standard negation, sentential negation, teen talk
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Never as negative preterite
  • 3.Aims
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Main readings of never
    • 5.2Distribution of the different readings of never
    • 5.3 Never as sentential negator in the past: Punctual and non-universal quantificational readings (NUQ) of never
    • 5.4 Never in negative concord structures
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 1 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00030.pal
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