Article published in:
English World-Wide
Vol. 38:2 (2017) ► pp. 153–180

Negative concord in the language of British adults and teenagers

| University of Santiago de Compostela
Negative concord (NC) (e.g. I don’t know nobody in Havering) has been the focus of a considerable number of diachronic as well as sociolinguistic studies, mainly in terms of its pervasiveness in the most common varieties of English. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the topic by examining NC in the language of British adults and teenagers. The findings, based on the analysis of data from three comparable adult and teenager corpora, indicate that: (i) NC is much more frequent in teenagers than in adults; (ii) the language of teenagers shows a wider variety of NC patterns than that of adults; (iii) the number of multiple negatives (e.g. I don’t want nothing to do with you no more) is not as common as expected, and they are found mainly in the expression of teenagers; (iv) pragmatically speaking, NC structures may be used to accentuate a negative meaning, although they are often equivalent to single negatives.
Keywords: negative polarity, negative concord, non-standard negation, teen talk, spoken English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Double/multiple negation and negative concord
  • 3.Objectives
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Frequency of negative concord structures in the language of London adults and teenagers
    • 5.2Distribution of negators in NC structures
    • 5.3Multiple negatives
    • 5.4The influence of linguistic factors in the occurrence of NC structures
      • 5.4.1Co-occurrence with other non-standard negatives (ain’t and third person singular present don’t)
      • 5.4.2Clause subject
    • 5.5Influencing sociolinguistic or external factors in the occurrence of NC structures
      • 5.5.1Gender
      • 5.5.2Anglo versus non-Anglo origin
  • 6.The pragmatics of NC structures
  • 7.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 28 September 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.38.2.02pal
References

Sources

BNC: British National Corpus
1991–1994 BNC Consortium (Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Larousse Kingfisher Chambers, Oxford University Computing Services, University Centre for Corpus Research on Language, British Library’s Research and Innovation Centre). http://​www​.natcorp​.ox​.ac​.uk
COLT: The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language
1993 Department of English. University of Bergen. Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen and Ingrid Kristine Hasund. http://​www​.hd​.uib​.no​/i​/Engelsk​/COLT​/index​.html
LIC: Linguistic Innovators Corpus: The Language of Adolescents in London
2004 Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen.Google Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte
2002 Negation in Non-standard British English. Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetries. Routledge: London and New York.Google Scholar
Anderwald, Liselotte
2005 “Negative concord in British English dialects”. In Yoko Iyeiri, ed. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 116–137. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Carl Lee
1970 “Double Negatives”. Linguistic Inquiry 1/21: 169–186.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan, and Karen P. Corrigan
2005 “ No, Nay, Never. Negation in Tyneside English”. In Yoko Iyeiri, ed. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 139–156. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny
1982 Variation in an English Dialect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1991 “Variation in the use of ain’t in an Urban British English Dialect”. In Peter Trudgill, and J. K. Chambers, eds. Dialects of English. London: Longman, 54–73.Google Scholar
1999 “English negation from an international perspective”. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie and Wim van der Wurff, eds. Negation in the History of English. Berlin & New York: Mouton, 29–53. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Susan Fox, Paul Kerswill, and Eivind Torgersen
2011 “Contact, the Feature Pool and the Speech Community: The Emergence of Multicultural London English”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 151: 151–196. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Feagin, Crawford
1979 Variation and Change in Alabama English: A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Foreman, John
1999 “Syntax of Negative Inversion in Non-Standard English”. In Kimary Shahin, Susan Blake, and Eun-Sook Kim, eds. The Proceedings of the Seventeenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 205–219.Google Scholar
Fox, Susan
2015 The New Cockney. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1978 “Negation in Language: Pragmatics, Function and Ontology”. In Peter Cole, ed. Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 69–112.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa
2002 African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Görlach, Manfred
1999 “Regional and Social Variation”. In Robert Lass, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language III1. 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 459–538.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1992 An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R.
1989 A Natural History of Negation. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1991 “Duplex negatio affirmat… The Economy of Double Negation”. CLS 271: 80–106.Google Scholar
ed. 2011 The Expression of Negation. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Howe, Darin M.
1997 “Negation and the History of African American English”. Language Variation and Change 91: 267–294. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Howe, Darin M., and James A. Walker
2000 “Negation and the Creole-Origins Hypothesis: Evidence from Early African American English”. In Shana Poplack, ed. The English History of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 109–140.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, Geoffrey Pullum, and Laurie Bauer
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iyeiri, Yoko
2005 Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1917 Negation in English and other Languages. Copenhagen: Host.Google Scholar
Jordan, Michael
1998 “The Power of Negation in English: Text, Context and Relevance”. Journal of Pragmatics 291: 705–752. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kaufmann, Anita
2002 “Negation and Prosody in British English: A Study Based on the London-Lund Corpus”. Journal of Pragmatics 341: 1473–1994. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul
2013 “Identity, Ethnicity and Place: The Construction of Youth Language in London”. In Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, eds. Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 128–164. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, Jenny Cheshire, Susan Fox, and Eivind Torgersen
2013 “English as a Contact Language: The Role of Children and Adolescents”. In Daniel Schreier, and Marianne Hundt, eds. English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 258–282.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer
eds. 2013 The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://​www​.ewave​-atlas​.org/ (accessed March 10, 2014).
Labov, William
1972 “Negative Attraction and Negative Concord in English Grammar”. Language 481: 773–818. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1994 Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1. Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Ronald K. S.
1991 Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonny Lasses in Ayr. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Malkamäki, Henriikka
2013 Gender-Based Use of Negative Concord in Non-Standard American English. B.A. Dissertation, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Mazzon, Gabriella
2004 A History of English Negation. Harlow: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Tertu
1999 “Social Mobility and the Decline of Multiple Negation in Early Modern English”. In Jacek Fisiak, and Marcin Krysier, eds. Advances in English Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 263–291.Google Scholar
2006 “Negative Concord as an English ‘Vernacular Universal’. Social History and Linguistic Typology”. Journal of English Linguistics 341: 257–278. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nishimura, Hideo
2005 “Decline of Multiple Negation Revisited”. In Yoko Iyeiri, ed. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 83–92. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio
2010 “ It Ain’t Nothing to Do with My School. Variation and Pragmatic Uses of Ain’t in the Language of British English Teenagers”. English Studies 9/51: 548–566. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 “The Expression of Negation in British Teenagers’ Language: A Preliminary Study”. Journal of English Linguistics 39/11: 4–35. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “ He Don’t Like Football, Does He? A Corpus-Based Study of Third Person Singular Don’t in the Language of British Teenagers”. In Elena Seoane, and Cristina Suárez-Gómez, eds. World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations (Varieties of English around the World). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 61–84.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul
2004 “A Remark on English Double Negatives”. In Eric Laporte, Mireille Piot, and Max Siberztein, eds. Syntaxe, lexique, et lexique-grammaire. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 497–508. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben
2005 Language Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti
1999 “Syntax”. In Robert Lass, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. III1: 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 187–331.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgard W.
1989 American Earlier Black English. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Seright, Orin Dale
1966 “Double Negatives in Standard Modern English”. American Speech 411: 123–126. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Singh, Rajendra
1970 “A Note on Multiple Negatives”. American Speech 411: 123–126.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer
2001 “Negative Concord in the Old and New World: Evidence from Scotland”. Language Variation and Change 131: 109–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1984 Conversational Styles. Analyzing Talk among Friends. Oxford: University Press.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Gunnel Tottie, and Wim van der Wurff
eds. 1999 Negation in the History of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Torgersen, Eivind N., Costas Gabrielatos, Sebastian Hoffmann, and Sue Fox
2011 “A Corpus-Based Study of Pragmatic Markers in London English”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7/11: 93–118.Google Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel
1991 Negation in English Speech and Writing. A Study in Variation. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1974 Sociolinguistics. An Introduction to Language and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
1990 The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ukaji, Masatomo
1999 “On the Scope of Negative Concord”. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie, and Wim van der Wurff, eds. Negation in the History of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 269–294. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van Alphen, Ingrid, and Isabelle Buchstaller
eds. 2012 Quotatives: Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Van der Wouden, Ton
1997 Negative Contexts: Collocation, Polarity and Multiple Negation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Walker, James A.
2005 “The Ain’t Constraint: Not-Contraction in Early African American English”. Language Variation and Change 171: 1–17. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Weldon, Tracey
1994 “Variability in Negation in African American Vernacular English”. Language Variation and Change 61: 359–397. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
White-Sustaita, Jessica
2010 “Reconsidering the Syntax of Non-Canonical Negative Inversion”. English Language and Linguistics 14/31: 429–455. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald
1992 “Back to the Past: The BEV/Creole Connection Revisited”. Language Variation and Change 41: 311–357. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, and Donna Christian
1976 Appalachian Speech. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes
2005 American English Dialects and Variation. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Zimmer, Karl E.
1964 “Affixal Negation in English and Other Languages: An Investigation of Restricted Productivity”. Supplement to Word 20/2, Monograph, number 5.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Blanchette, Frances & Cynthia Lukyanenko
2019. Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap. Frontiers in Psychology 10 Crossref logo
Moore, Emma & Sarah Spencer
2021. “It just sounds proper common”: Exploring the social meanings expressed by nonstandard grammar. Linguistics and Education 63 ► pp. 100933 ff. Crossref logo
Palacios, Ignacio M.
2019. Vernon never called for me yesterday. English Text Construction 12:2 ► pp. 290 ff. Crossref logo
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M.
2021. Taboo vocatives in the language of London teenagers. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 31:2 ► pp. 250 ff. Crossref logo
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio Miguel
2021. Recent changes in London English. An overview of the main lexical, grammar and discourse features of Multicultural London English (MLE). Complutense Journal of English Studies 29 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo
Suárez‐Gómez, Cristina & Elena Seoane
2021. The role of age and gender in grammatical variation in world Englishes. World Englishes Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.