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

favour the use of ne alone, rather than ... not or not, and to
other syntactic contexts which, conversely, favour the use of ne
not or not, rather than ne alone. This is an aspect of negation
which had first been discussed by Kent (1890), but which had been
little considered since then. As Jack himself acknowledges, however.
the middle period of ME lacks prose material suitable for
investigation and is not for this reason examined fully in his material
(Jack 1978c: 67).
In respect of the second issue (i.e. 'negative concord'), Jack
discusses the use of forms such as ever in negative clauses and
the use of and, or in place of ne/nor. He borrows a hint from
Labov's (1972) article entitled 'Negative Attraction and Negative
Concord in English Grammar', which examines the PE usage of
multiple negation observed in the American black society today.
As I surmise, it is not a mere accident that the same issue
attracted attention from Labov and Jack around the same time, the
former of whom is a modern linguist and the latter of whom is a
historical linguist. The 1970s see a revival in the interest in English
negative constructions in general, which produces some major modern
linguistic studies as well. Klima's (196/i) substantial article, published
in 1964 and entitled 'Negation in English', is almost still an
authoritative as well as a pioneering study of negation within the
framework of transformational generative grammar. Klima is followed
by Jackendoff (1969 and 1972), who discusses PE negation from a
more semantic point of view. Lakoff (1969), on the other hand,
discusses some issues of negation from a fairly pragmatic
perspective. Thus the surge of interest in English negative
constructions at this period is not simply confined to historical
linguistics, but more broadly witnessed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of studies of English negative
constructions were produced besides Jack (1978a, 1978b, and 1978c)
11