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

issue of interest, which still attracts many scholars. Visser (1963-73,
III: 1411-76) gives some detailed accounts of the development of
negative constructions, which include a discussion of the auxiliary
do, while I)enison's (1985) account of the development of the auxiliary
do, which is more theoretical, should also be mentioned here. Some
new studies about this subject are still being produced. Rissanen
(1991), for example, is one of the most representative.
The gap of scholarship between the German scholarly tradition at
the beginning of the twentieth century, which produced a number of
studies on negation, and the 1970s, when a new influx of studies
comes into being, witnesses a single scholar called Levin, who
interests himself in a particular phenomenon of negation. He
investigates negative contraction as illustrated by nam (< ne am) and
nolde (< ne wolde) (Levin 1956 and 1958). The existence of the
phenomenon itself had long been noted in previous studies, but Levin
was the first other than Forstrom (1948) to pay special attention to
the dialectal distinctions involved in it. While Forstrm (1948) only
deals with the issue in relation to forms of be, Levin, however,
extends his scope of investigation to all the relevant forms of
negative contraction. Apparently Levin (1958) is based on his
dissertation (Levin 1956), but adds some further research and
corrects some factual errors. For example, Levin's (1956: 65-6)
account in his dissertation that there is a distinction in the usage
between prose and verse in London English and Chaucer 6 disappears
in Levin (1958: 499-500), who on the contrary maintains that prose
and verse do not show any noticeable differences. The omission of
the old account was perhaps reasonable, since as I maintain in my
dissertation, contracted forms, at least in Chaucer, are not
conditioned by whether they occur in prose or verse (Iyeiri 1989a:
6 His phrase 'London and Chaucer' is rather misleading, since his
account is solely based on some of Chaucer's works.
8