Introduction

It would be difficult to deny the existence of recurrent topics and research areas in English linguistics and, even more, in the general linguistic panorama. They are generally fields of study that stand out for their complexity and universality. They normally show relevant implications for the entire grammatical system and they tend to be susceptible of analysis from multiple perspectives and approaches. Without doubt, one of these major linguistic areas is negation. Several scholars (Jespersen 1917; Poldauf 1979; Horn 1978; Tottie 1991, Wouden 1997) to mention just a few, have already referred to the linguistic and extralinguistic reasons and factors that justify the study of negative polarity as it is connected not only with Linguistics but with a wide range of disciplines. There is such a variety of bibliography of negation, mostly bearing on negation in English, and this number has certainly been increased in the last two decades with many contributions dealing with the syntactic and socio-pragmatics of English negation at both the micro and macro levels of language. However, there are still some areas of this field which deserve closer study.

Multiple negation – the use of two or sometimes several negative markers in a statement – often provokes disapproval, and is viewed by many speakers as somehow illogical: two negatives surely do not make a positive? This prescriptive view of language – the notion that linguistic rules should apply according to logic or mathematics – stems from eighteenth-century attempts by the so-called grammarians to make the English Language conform to a certain set of rules. In many cases these rules applied to the classical languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, but not to English, which is after all ostensibly a Germanic language. You only have to consider the French constructions ne… pas or ne… jamais to realize other languages allow multiple negation quite happily and, closer to home the construction neither… nor seems to escape disapproval.

Multiple negatives were considered perfectly acceptable in most forms of Early and Middle English. Although modern Standard English speakers studiously avoid this, multiple negatives thrive in most non-standard dialects of English, often serving to intensify or enhance the negative impact of a statement.

I used many theoretical books to do my course paper, such as: «Negation in English and Other Languages» by Otto Jespersen; «Negative Contexts: Collocation, Polarity, and Multiple Negation» by Ton van der Wouden and others, where I have found all necessary information for my investigation.

The object of the course paper is the phenomenon of multiple negation through the history of English.

The aim of the course paper lies in investigation multiple negation in different periods of the history of English and to find and analyze multiple negation in the «Morte Darthur» by Thomas Malory.

multiple negation english classification

1. Multiple negation in the history of English

1.1  Old English and Middle English periods

Multiple negation is a quite common phenomenon in most European languages (Horn, 1978; Dahl, 1979; Payne, 1985). Structures of this kind are frequent in the languages of the Slavic family (e.g. Russian, Macedonian, Czech, Bulgarian, Lithuanian) as well as in the Romance languages (e.g. Portuguese, Sardinian, Frulian, Galician, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, French). However, multiple negation does not normally apply to modern Germanic languages, such as Danish, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Frisian, as well, of course, as English itself. Surprisingly enough, in the particular case of English, a survey of its historical development shows that multiple negation was common in Old, Middle and Early Modern English (cf. Traugott, 1992:268; Barber, 1993:119).

The two or more negative words are used to negate the sentence.

(1)  Ne they be nat in commune … nor one man hath nat al vertues. (Elyot, Governor)

(2)  Withstand not the knowen trueth no longer. (Martin Marprelate)

(3)  I haue one heart, one bosome, and one truth,

And that no woman has nor neuer none

Shall mistris be of it, saue I alone. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

These negatives do not cancel one another out, but reinforce one another: the more negatives there are, the more emphatic the negation is. In late Middle English, negation is often achieved by putting ne early in the sentence, and nat after the verb. This is still found in the early sixteenth century, as in example (1). As ne fell into disuse, it becomes common to negate a sentence with nat (or not alone). Nevertheless, multiple negation continues to be found alongside simple not throughout the sixteen century, as in 2 and 3.

Jespersen (1940:426–429) describes the rise of multiple negation as follows, Originally, sentences were negated with the negative particle ne, as in Ic ne secge «I do not say». As ne is a relatively inconspicuous element, being regularly reduced and fused with the verb, it came to be strengthened with another negative, such as na «'no», nalles «not at all» or noht, from nowiht «nothing». Both types, Ic ne secge and Ic ne secge noht occurred during the period of Old English for which we have written records. The use of the double negative was normal, less than 35 per cent of the total negative statements occur with multiple negative particles.

The second stage in the development of negation continues into the Middle English period, though with the multiple negative construction becoming increasingly common. ............