Some historical notes on English negation : unethes, almost and hardly
Tubau, Susagna (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Ingham, Richard

Data:	2015
Descripció:	11 pàg.
Resum:	In this article, we have shown that unethes (the Late Middle English equivalent of ‘hardly’) occurred with both any- and n-series in Late Middle English. To explain this state of affairs, we have presented an account of the development of unethes as the consequence of a process of grammaticalisation from a lexical content word, meaning “with difficulty”, to a scalar modifier specified with a negative syntactic feature, [iNeg] that can license indefinites of the any-series and minimisers, as well as n-words containing an uninterpretable negative feature [uNeg]. Because Middle English was a Negative Concord language, unethes also developed a [uNeg] lexical entry in conformity with other n-words, hence making it possible for it to be under the scope of negation. However, as unethes was crucially different from n-words in that it was not an indefinite, this had further implications for its syntactic behaviour, to which we plan to return in future research. In any case, it has been shown that the change in the distribution of scalar modifiers unethes and hardly between Late Middle and Early Modern English is in line with the general tendency of English to lose a Negative Concord grammar over that time span.
Ajuts:	Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación FFI2011-23356 Generalitat de Catalunya 2014SGR1013
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Capítol de llibre ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar
Publicat a:	Studies in Linguistic Variation and Change : from Old to Middle English, 2015, p. 215-226, ISBN 9781042881246

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