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The grammaticalisation of never in British English dialects: Quantifying syntactic and functional change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2020

CLAIRE CHILDS Open the ORCID record for CLAIRE CHILDS [Opens in a new window]
CLAIRE CHILDS*
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, Heslington, YorkYO10 5DD, UKclaire.childs@york.ac.uk
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Abstract

Never originated as a temporal adverb expressing universal quantification over time (‘Type 1’, e.g. he’s never been to Paris). As Lucas & Willis (2012) report, it has developed non-quantificational meanings equivalent to didn’t, starting with the ‘Type 2’ use which depicts an event that could have occurred in a specific ‘window of opportunity’ (e.g. she waited but he never arrived). Subsequently, a non-standard ‘Type 3’ use developed, where never can be used with other predicates (e.g. I never won that competition yesterday). To what extent does variation in the use of never in present-day English reflect the proposed historical development of the form? This study addresses this question by integrating syntactic theory into a quantitative variationist approach, analysing never vs. didn’t in Type 2 and Type 3 contexts using speech corpora from three Northern British communities. The results show how syntactic–semantic constraints on never in Type 2 contexts persist in its newer, Type 3 uses, e.g. it is used at higher rates in achievement predicates. While Type 2 contexts are associated with the expression of counter-expectation, never has become pragmatically strengthened in its Type 3 use, where it is often used to contradict a previously-expressed proposition.

Keywords

comparative syntaxgrammaticalisationlanguage variation and changenegationpersistencevariationist sociolinguistic methods
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 531 - 568
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) North East Doctoral Training Centre – the paper is developed from a chapter of my doctoral thesis (Childs 2017a). I would like to thank Karen Corrigan, Anders Holmberg and Heike Pichler for their valuable feedback on the research as my supervisors, as well as David Britain and Geoff Poole as my examiners. Many thanks also go to Jane Stuart-Smith, Heike Pichler and the DECTE team for allowing me to use their corpora for this study. I am also grateful for the comments received from the Journal of Linguistics editor and three anonymous referees.

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