The grammaticalisation ofneverin British English dialects: Quantifying syntactic and functional change

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.

Mechanisms of Grammaticalization in the Variation of Negative Question Tags

“…The investigation uses data from three corpora which represent urban vernaculars spoken in Glasgow (Scotland), Tyneside (Northeast England), and Salford (Greater Manchester) respectively. The recording samples extracted from these corpora have previously been used in analyses of other types of variation in negation: not-/no-negation and negative concord (Childs 2017a) and never (Childs 2021).…”