Willis David, Lucas Christopher, Breitbarth Anne (Eds.). The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean: Volume I: Case Studies

Oxford University Press, 2013. — 556 p. — (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics 5).This volume represents the first of a two-volume work examining the historical development of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It integrates existing work from typological and generative synchronic approaches with detailed philological work on the histories of individual languages to give a uniquely comparative diachronic perspective. In this first volume, leading experts on the history of negation in various languages have been brought together to give an assessment of the state of the art of research in their field. We provide an overview of the main trends of development, such as patterns of grammaticalization and renewal of negative markers (Jespersen’s cycle) and recurrent shifts in the distribution of negative indefinites, and follow this with individual chapters covering French, Italian (Italo-Romance), English, German, Low German and Dutch, Brythonic Celtic (Welsh, Breton), Greek, Slavonic, Arabic and Afro-Asiatic, and Mordvin (Uralic). Each chapter outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and the development of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord, in a given language or language group. Where appropriate for the language in question, other topics covered include the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation.