{"title":"On analysing fragments: the case of No?","authors":"Phillip Wallage, Wim van der Wurff","doi":"10.1515/ling-2022-0096","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This paper addresses the analysis of sentence fragments, specifically the English negative polar response item no. Two main types of synchronic analysis have been proposed for present-day English – one in which yes and no are syntactically inert particles which substitute for a clause, the other in which they are the initial element of an elided clause. Using diachronic data from 15th- to 17th-century English, we argue that the emergence of a novel other-speaker question pattern involving no demonstrates that speakers of early English analysed interrogative polar no as the initial element of a clause with TP-ellipsis. This novel pattern has received little attention in the literature, yet this grammatical innovation is interesting because its emergence demonstrates how diachronic change can be used as a diagnostic for underlying grammatical structure.","PeriodicalId":47548,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2022-0096","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper addresses the analysis of sentence fragments, specifically the English negative polar response item no. Two main types of synchronic analysis have been proposed for present-day English – one in which yes and no are syntactically inert particles which substitute for a clause, the other in which they are the initial element of an elided clause. Using diachronic data from 15th- to 17th-century English, we argue that the emergence of a novel other-speaker question pattern involving no demonstrates that speakers of early English analysed interrogative polar no as the initial element of a clause with TP-ellipsis. This novel pattern has received little attention in the literature, yet this grammatical innovation is interesting because its emergence demonstrates how diachronic change can be used as a diagnostic for underlying grammatical structure.
期刊介绍:
Linguistics publishes articles in the traditional subdisciplines of linguistics as well as in neighboring disciplines insofar as these are deemed to be of interest to linguists and other students of natural language. This includes grammar, both functional and formal, with a focus on morphology, syntax, and semantics, pragmatics and discourse, phonetics and phonology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. The focus may be on one or several languages, but studies with a wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage are also welcome. The perspective may be synchronic or diachronic. Linguistics also publishes up to two special issues a year in these areas, for which it welcomes proposals.