A Diachronic Survey of English Negative Concord

IN LANGUAGE IN THE INNER CITY, WILLIAM LABOV asserts that the grammatical feature that he calls NEGATIVE CONCORD, the spread of a negative element from one clause to another subordinate to it without a change in meaning, operates only in the Black English Vernacular (1972, 152-53).' Wolfram and Christian (1976) and Feagin (1979) have found evidence that at least two groups of white speakers of nonstandard English use negative concord to a limited extent. For example, Feagin reports, for an Alabama white dialect, I don't feel like nobody pets me (where the second negative is on the indeterminate) and We ain't never really had no tornadoes in this area that I don't remember (with spread of the negative to the verb remember). In light of their discoveries, Labov concedes in his introduction to Feagin's book that, though data supporting a creolization hypothesis may be found in the tense and aspect systems of BEV, this negative construction is not evidence of creolization. Evidence bearing on the creolization question exists in the earlier forms of English. In this essay, I examine various instances of negative concord ranging from Old English through Middle English and into Modern English, current as well as early. Negative concord has been a native grammatical construction since the time of Alfred, at least, and it still has a marginal status even in standard English. Because it has been in long-standing use, negative concord cannot be used to support the creolization position which posits that BEV grew out of Atlantic or Caribbean pidgins and not other English dialects.2 Perhaps more importantly, its tenacious survival into the present highlights the loss of options available to the straitened standard. Recent grammars have little to say about this special kind of double negative, but some of them describe it and give examples. Bacquet, in his treatment of Alfredian language, cites the syntactic pattern with negative verbs and 'negative concord': ce que l'on pourrait appeler une negativite par concordance dans les conjonctives qui suivent des principales contenant un verbe de sens negatif (1982, 503-4). Jespersen also discusses the pattern, but calls it PARATACTIC NEGATION

Linguistics · Statistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · History · Philosophy

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