Review of:

Iyeiri, Yoko. 2001. Negative Constructions in Middle English. Kiyushu University Press. 

April 2002 (HSL/SHL 2)

Iyeiri does not claim to provide anything but a purely descriptive account of negative constructions in Middle English, though her book may well serve as a data source for more theoretical approaches. Chapter 1 gives an overview of earlier work on negative constructions and a short description of the ME texts on which the study is based. Chapter 2, ‘Historical development of ME negative constructions’, investigates the distribution of the various negators in ME texts. The ne … not construction is not as robustly represented in the texts as would be expected on the basis of ‘Jespersen’s Cycle’, which distinguishes the various stages in which the negative adverb ne declines and not takes over. As the ne … not construction represents a crucial intermediate stage, it is puzzling to find it so underrepresented in the data: there is not a single text in which ne … not is the predominant form of negation.

Chapter 3, ‘Syntactic varieties of negation’, reports that ne is found occasionally separated from the finite verb in ME. This development is perhaps more significant than Iyeiri realizes. Although it is certainly a ‘minor’ phenomenon in absolute figures, it clearly shows that ne has become morphologically free at least in some dialects, which ties in with the development of other ‘Infl’-elements (most notably infinitival to) which also develops into a free word in this period. There are also data on the position of not which may both precede and follow the finite verb, although the former is more or less restricted to verse, a phenomenon which is plausibly linked to the verb-final position in subclauses which persists in ME due to the exigencies of rhyme (p. 49). Not follows here the position of OE na (as was also noted by Van Kemenade 2000: 69).

Chapter 4, ‘Negative constructions and the nature of the finite verb’, provides quantitative data on the frequency of ne as sole negator with the verbs witen, will, be and have. These verbs are more often found with ne as sole negator than others. Ne as sole negator also tends to be more frequent with the other auxiliaries than with lexical verbs. Few texts exhibit both contracted and uncontracted ne forms: they either contract or do not contract, which makes it practically impossible to discover what factors trigger contraction.

Chapter 5, ‘Negative constructions and syntactic conditions’, investigates the negatives used in a variety of clauses: interrogative and conditional clauses, that-clauses dependent on a negative clause and on ‘negative’ verbs like douten ‘to doubt’ and forbeden ‘forbid’, imperative and optative clauses, and the expletive negation after conjunctions like before, unless and lest. The findings support the expectation generated by earlier studies that ne as sole negator is found in non-assertive contexts which do not require emphatic marking of the negation. When the conjunction ne ‘nor’ happens to be followed by the finite verb, in a negative clause, the negator ne is hardly ever present, probably to avoid the sequence ne ne. Ne as sole negator is rare with subject-verb inversion (=V2 after topics), a situation markedly different from interrogatives clauses (=V2 after interrogative operators) which show the opposite tendency: a greater use of ne as sole negator. Jack (1978:307) interpreted this difference as the search for a formal distinction between declaratives and interrogatives; Iyeiri speculates that rhythm may play a part, although her wording appears to refer to syntax rather than prosody (‘the use of the adverb ne which precedes the subject when the order is inverted perhaps incites the feeling of the existence of some missing elements after the subject’, p. 115). An appeal to ‘rhythm’ fails to account for the observed difference between operator and topic inversion, however.

Chapter 6, ‘Multiple negation’, investigates the decrease of multiple negation in the ME period. The decline of ne is an important factor here, but the use of and and or instead of the older ne/nor conjunctions is also relevant, as is the rise of any and ever. Latin influence, often cited as the cause of the decline, is less likely to have played a part in ME in view of Iyeiri’s finding that multiple negation is more frequent in formal than in informal ME texts.

Chapter 7, ‘Negative contraction’, brings us back to matters discussed in Chapter 4, and Iyeiri would have done better to integrate the two chapters. Contraction data show a lot of variation through space and time, and is further conditioned by certain syntactic environments. Emphatic contexts where the negation needs to be clearly marked (i.e. imperatives) tend to yield larger percentages of uncontracted items. The data confirm to some extent Jack’s claim that ne + finite verb is particularly unlikely to be contracted in clause-initial position.

Chapter 8, ‘Summary and conclusions’, is an essential chapter, as the rationale behind many of the earlier chapters only becomes clear after reading the conclusions.

Although this work repeats, to some extent, the work done on negatives by George Jack, to whose memory the book is dedicated, Iyeiri’s study investigates a larger corpus, and a greater number of negative items (including never and no), and further differs from Jack’s in that it includes verse. Much of the added value of Iyeiri’s study, then, boils down to the differences she finds between prose and verse, although her overall conclusions largely support those of Jack. Unfortunately, there is no added value of interpretation or analysis, whose absence is particularly conspicuous in Chapter 3, as the various word order phenomena investigated there generate many questions: has ne ceased to be a verbal clitic, and why? If not positioned before the finite verb in subclauses in ME verse is a relic of the older OE order, how to interpret the greater frequency of this order in eModE? Is the greater frequency of pronominal objects before not in verse also an OE relic, a reminder of the earlier clitic status of pronouns?

There are also some flaws in the presentation of Iyeiri’s findings, such as her failure to provide a clear line of argument which guides the reader to the why of her many graphs. The graphs cannot provide their own raison d’être: it is up to the author to guide the reader to their salient points, which in many cases become clear only after reading Chapter 8. Important interpretational issues are often tucked away in footnotes instead of discussed upfront; an example is the difficulty of disambiguating the sentential negator not from the constituent negator not (p. 43, fn 5). Lumping no and ne together requires more justification than the casual remark ‘No is occasionally used as an orthographic variant of … ne in ME’ in a footnote on p. 41, in view of their very different distribution in OE (see Van Kemenade 2000), especially if we see no separated from the finite verb. Finally, the at times careless referencing means a lot of extra work for the reader, who is continually puzzling over what phrases like ‘this tendency’ may refer back to, or ‘for the same reason as mentioned in 2.1’ (p. 28), which a re-perusal of section 2.1 does nothing to clarify. Numbering (and glossing and/or translating) the ME examples would also have made for easier reference, and greater readability.

A lot of hard work has gone into this book, and its findings are of great interest to anyone working on negation in the history of English. To my mind it does demonstrate, however, that the value of quantitative methods for such an important syntactic category as negation is limited if there is no supporting framework to guide the research questions. The extra value that a thorough knowledge of the syntax of negation yields for a coherent account of the development of negation in English is clear from such recent work as Ingham (2000) or Van Kemenade (2000), and is ignored at one’s peril.

Bettelou Los, Dept. of General Linguistics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. (Contact the reviewer.)

References:

Jack, G. B. (1978). Negative adverbs in Early Middle English. English Studies 59: 295-309.

Ingham, Richard (2000). Negation and OV order in Late Middle English. Journal of Linguistics 36:13-38.

Kemenade, Ans van (2000). Jespersen's cycle revisited: Formal properties of grammaticalization. In: Pintzuk, Susan, et al. (eds.) Diachronic syntax: Models and mechanisms, 51-74. Oxford: OUP.