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

30-5). His later work is, in general, an excellent piece, although the
analysis could have been conducted by the method of separating each
verb concerned in discussion instead of dealing with forms such as
nam, nolde, and nadde altogether. Mustanoja (1960: 339) adopts
Levin's account that negative contraction is a phenomenon much more
commonly attested in the West Midlands and in the South than in the
East Midlands and in the North. One odd feature of Levin (1958) is
the fact that he maintains that the Kentish usage conforms to the
East Midland and the Northern usages without providing any data
from Kentish texts (498, n. 22), although I realize that Old Kentish
Sermons, Arthur and Merlin, and Avenbite of Inwit are explored as
Kentish texts in his dissertation (Levin 1956: 55-6).
Levin stays almost as a lone investigator in this field until the
monumental atlas by McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin (1986) comes out.
The atlas deals with negative contraction as one of the distinctive
linguistic features to localize late ME texts, and identifies a number
of contracted forms in a much larger corpus than in Levins work,
supplementing the then existent mapping of the phenomemon to a
significant extent. To investigate and analyze the issue of negative
contraction is, however, by no means the ultimate objective of the
atlas. Perhaps by intention, therefore, the combination of the adverb
ne and relevant forms of be, have, will, witen which are not
contracted (e.g. ne am and ne wolde as opposed to contracted
negative forms such as nam and nolde) is not consistently
investigated in the atlas, which could have been useful in the
interest of linguistic analysis of the phenomenon. The atlas,
however, provides valuable and most up-to-date material on the
distribution of the phenomenon.
Apart from Levin (1956 and 1958) and the linguistic atlas by
McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin (1986), my analysis of Chaucers
Canterbury Tales deals with the issue of negative contraction.
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