Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress

Structural explanations in syntactic variation: The evolution of English negative and polarity indefinites

“…This explanation has had a noteworthy impact on both subsequent research into the evolution of negative/polarity indefinites in the history of English and on the development of theories of morphosyntactic change. The lexical effect reported by Tottie (1991a) has been replicated in diverse datasets of English (Childs et al, 2015, forthcoming; Varela Pérez, 2014). For example, in the comparative study of English spoken in Canada, including Toronto (using the TEA), Belleville (Tagliamonte, 2003–2006), the United Kingdom (using the York English Corpus [Tagliamonte, 1998] and North East England [Corrigan, Buchstaller, Mearns, & Hermann, 2010–2012; Tagliamonte, 1998, 2003–2006]), Childs et al (2015, forthcoming) reproduced the same lexical effects and roughly the same construction hierarchy as Tottie, as in Table 2 1…”

“…Tottie's analysis of the patterns shown in Table 1 involves two distinct propositions. The first proposal, which is shared implicitly or explicitly by most works on the emergence of any indefinites in the history of English, is that the newer polarity item form ( any ) is in the process of replacing the older negative quantifier form ( no ) in all postverbal syntactic positions (Childs et al, 2015, forthcoming; Mitchell, 1985; Nevalainen, 1998, 2009; Smith, 2001; Varela Perez, 2014; among many others). Under this assumption, the results in Table 1 appear to show that the change is diffusing across individual lexical items/constructions, being closer to completion with lexical verbs than with existential constructions.…”

“…According to many authors (Childs, Harvey, Corrigan, & Tagliamonte, 2015, forthcoming; Mitchell, 1985; Nevalainen, 1998, 2009; Smith, 2001; Tottie, 1991a, 1991b; Varela Perez, 2014; among many others), the newer NPI variants are in the process of replacing the older Neg-Q variants in the language. In support of this proposal, these authors argued that no / not … any variation in a number of modern and historical varieties of English is primarily conditioned by verb/construction frequency, with the most frequent verbal constructions favoring the use of the older form no and the least frequent constructions favoring the use of the innovative form not … any .…”

On the status of NCIs: An experimental investigation on so-called Strict NC languages

“…This means that the use of NQs in post-verbal position is a syntactically marked option. In addition, previous corpus-based research has shown that negation with NQs is favored with BE/HAVE, while negation with a negative marker and any-PIs is favored with lexical verbs (Tottie 1991a, b;Varela Pérez 2014;Childs et al 2015;Wallage 2017).…”