MULTIPLE NEGATION IN MODERN ENGLISH. A PRELIMINARY CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Although multiple negation was common in Old, Middle, & Early Modern English, it has become stigmatized as illogical & ungrammatical in Contemporary English. Following a survey of some studies devoted to multiple negation in nonstandard varieties of English, a corpus analysis is conducted using data from the British English component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). An attempt is made to identify all the different types & subtypes of multiple negatives in the corpus & subject them to syntactic, semantic, & pragmatic analyses. The study has mainly a qualitative thrust, & occasional comparisons are drawn between spoken & written codes. Dependent & independent double negatives are distinguished, & several syntactic subcategories are differentiated within the latter. Both types are used to produce the effect of meaning intensification. However, many independent negatives are used in litotes-like figures to express an understatement on the speaker's/writer's part, as the negative meaning is weakened by affirming something through the contrary. Also, many independent negatives involving a modal operator & a negative infinitive convey an emphatically positive meaning, ie, a denial. 2 Tables, 61 References. Z. Dubiel