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Yoko Iyieri PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText - University ...

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CHAPTER I<br />

Introd uction<br />

1.1. The nature of the present thesis<br />

The present thesis investigates the historical development of negative<br />

constructions in selected ME verse texts and provides a descriptive<br />

account of it. This thesis presents much new information to<br />

supplement existing historical studies of negation, a survey of which<br />

is given below (1.2.). The principal interest of the present thesis<br />

lies in syntactic analyses of negation, but some other related issues<br />

are also examined and discussed in this study. The aspects of<br />

negation that are analyzed in this thesis are stated at the concluding<br />

part of 1.2. below, while the corpus selected for the purpose of<br />

investigation is described in 1.3. below.<br />

1.2. Previous research on negative constructions with special<br />

reference to ME<br />

Previous studies of the historical development of negative<br />

constructions are relatively sparse. For a study with some<br />

comprehensive coverage of English negative constructions, we must<br />

go back to Jespersen (1917), whose work is entitled Ne gation in<br />

English and Other Languages. The study stands out even today for<br />

its wide-ranging treatment of negation, since most existing studies so<br />

far available deal only with some specific aspects of negation or<br />

negation of some specific periods or authors. Jespersen explores<br />

English negative constructions from a diachronic and a synchronic<br />

perspective, stretching the field of discussion even to some foreign<br />

languages. Not only does his account provide an illuminating<br />

historical outline of the development of negative constructions, which<br />

1

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