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Two negatives in Tyneside English questions: Negative concord or double negation?

Bailey, Laura R. and Childs, Claire (2024) Two negatives in Tyneside English questions: Negative concord or double negation? In: Gianollo, Chiara and van der Auwera, Johan, eds. One hundred years of negative concord. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] . Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 269-302. ISBN 978-3-11-120227-3. (doi:10.1515/9783111202273-011) (KAR id:105661)

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce an unusual negative construction found in Tyneside English (Northeast England) where two sentential negative elements can co-occur in questions: Didn’t she not go on holiday?. We present acceptability judgement data comparing the construction to Standard English “inner” and “outer” negation and Tyneside English tag questions and argue that the phenomenon under discussion is negative concord. We provide an analysis following Zeijlstra (2004) and Tubau (2016) in which the lower negative element not can have an uninterpretable [uNEG] feature, causing it to enter into a negative concord relation with the higher n’t, which explains the variation in usage that we find in this variety.

Item Type: Book section
DOI/Identification number: 10.1515/9783111202273-011
Uncontrolled keywords: negative concord, Tyneside English, negative questions, tag questions, inner negation, outer negation
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Laura Bailey
Date Deposited: 17 Apr 2024 14:01 UTC
Last Modified: 08 Jan 2025 11:01 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/105661 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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