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Isabelle Burke and Kate Burridge’s research focuses on the evolution of taboo negators in current Australian English. They give evidence that phrases like damn/bugger/fuck all (‘X-all’) began life with an inherently negative value and do not represent an advanced stage in the ‘Jespersen cycle’ of negator renewal (Jespersen 1917). Their data comes from the University of Western Australia corpus of informal spoken Australian English, coupled with survey data from 170 Australian undergraduate and postgraduate students on the acceptability of ‘X-all’ with and without an explicitly negated verb. The survey respondents rated the version without an explicit negator very positively, but dismissed the version with a negator as ungrammatical, commenting that the combination of bugger all with an explicit negator was ‘double negation’, and therefore unacceptable. While there is irony in their application of a formal English rule to informal grammar, they support the analysis of ‘X-all’ as a fully fledged marker of negation (‘not’). The authors argue that this development was assisted by social and cultural pressures – the more informal character of Australian culture and its greater willingness to embrace colloquial styles.

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