Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain.

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain.

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain.

This volume offers reviews of cross-linguistic research on the major classic issues in negation, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume will be an essential reference on the topic of negation for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary is the ideal dictionary for advanced EFL/ESL learners. Easy to use and with a great CD-ROM - the perfect learner's dictionary for exam success. First published as the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, this new edition has been completely updated and redesigned. - References to over 170,000 words, phrases and examples explained in clear and natural English - All the important new words that have come into the language (e.g. dirty bomb, lairy, 9/11, clickable) - Over 200 'Common Learner Error' notes, based on the Cambridge Learner Corpus from Cambridge ESOL exams Plus, on the CD-ROM: - SMART thesaurus - lets you find all the words with the same meaning - QUICKfind - automatically looks up words while you are working on-screen - SUPERwrite - tools for advanced writing, giving help with grammar and collocation - Hear and practise all the words.

This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation – the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses – is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, i.e. asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc.) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types – symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.

This volume features new and groundbreaking research on recent changes in the English verb phrase.

An exploration of grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. The book presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences.

This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies. Tanja Herrmann's study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England. This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.

Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.