Drawing primarily on the data collated by Alluhaybi (2019. Negation in modern Arabic varieties from a typological point of view. London: SOAS University of London PhD thesis), this article first situates Arabic within the crosslinguistic typology of negative strategies put forward, among others, by Miestamo (2005. Standard negation: The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). It then surveys the main parameters of variation among different varieties of Arabic in the expression of standard negation, non-verbal negation, and negative imperatives, with a particular focus on the issue of the single versus bipartite expression of negation. The article finishes by looking at some recent debates concerning the diachronic evolution of the observed patterns.

This article discusses Maltese words containing an innovative final /n/, arguing that /n/ addition is motivated by speakers’ expectation that lexical items resemble prototypical Maltese phonological words. /n/ is added to items that deviate from this prototype in containing a word-final stressed open syllable. Syllable closure through consonant addition eliminates this deviation. /n/ is the consonant chosen because of its pre-existing alternation with zero wordfinally. Discussion of the details of this process and the items it does (not) affect sheds light on the history of Arabic and Maltese, as well as on the nature of irregular phonological change in general.

This chapter turns to external motivations for changes in the licensing conditions of indefinites and in their series formation. It is shown by means of selected examples that language contact is not so much responsible for triggering the quantifier or free-choice cycles, but rather that the distribution of individual indefinites as well as of entire series may be influenced by patterns in contact languages. This may lead for instance to the imposition of negative concord, or the restructuring of an entire indefinite system after the model of a contact language. The chapter furthermore addresses the role of variation within the diasystem of one language for the advancement of changes affecting indefinites in the scope of negation.

This chapter shows that, across languages, indefinites show a tendency to become increasingly restricted to ever-stronger negative polarity contexts, eventually becoming restricted to the scope of negation and beginning to enter negative-concord relations. It is shown that developments affecting indefinites can be grouped into two types of development: a quantifier cycle and a free-choice cycle. In the former, indefinites gradually change from (more) positive to (more) negative, in the latter, original free-choice indefinites become NPI-indefinites. It is also shown that negative quantifiers do not typically arise through either development, but through univerbation with a former negative particle. Apparently countercyclic developments can be observed as well. The chapter concludes with an overview of the typology of negative concord, and the diachronic connections between the types of negative concord.

This chapter focuses on the language-internal motivations for the processes observed in chapter 2, in particular, the change from negative polarity adverb to negator. The chapter discusses what motivates the actuation of a new postverbal marker or negative quantifier, what obstacles need to be overcome in order to complete this process, and what processes lie behind the loss or exaptation of the original negation markers after such a development. It is argued that both functional and formal factors play a role in explaining the diachronic development of markers of negation in Jespersen’s cycle. In particular, a negation phrase (NegP)-free account making use of economy principles (Minimize Structure and Feature Economy) is proposed to capture the typological and diachronic variation of negative markers.

This chapter turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pattern of the development in northwestern Europe observed in chapter 2, the current chapter considers the question of whether Jespersen’s cycle was a single innovation that spread through language contact, or whether there were several separate instances of Jespersen’s cycle in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The timing of the changes in the different languages are mapped to the socio-historical situations, leading to the conclusion that in northwestern Europe at least, the trigger of Jespersen’s cycle was much less frequently contact-induced than previously thought. An in-depth case study of three Afro-Asiatic languages in North Africa, however, shows that language contact can lead to the diffusion of Jespersen’s cycle across a wide area. Furthermore, the stability of the transitional stage II may be related to the type of contact situation.

Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, this chapter presents empirical generalizations about Jespersen’s cycle. The focus lies on incipient Jespersen’s cycle—that is, the factors contributing to the emergence and generalization of new items that have the potential to successfully become new standard expressions of negation. The chapter rejects a teleological view of Jespersen’s cycle and therefore broadens the empirical base by also looking at languages in which there are linguistic elements that seem to fulfil at least some criteria of successful new negative markers, but which nevertheless never reach the next expected step in the development. It furthermore highlights two topics rarely discussed in the literature on Jespersen’s cycle: the comparative speed of the development in different languages and the fate of the original negators after the end of cycle.

The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cycles), including the diachronic development of negative concord. In each case, there are relevant empirical observations across the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The book considers both language-internal and language-contact motivations for the changes observed, developing a generative account of the developments in terms of semantic change, reanalysis, and child-language acquisition, integrating insights from functionalist approaches that invoke language use as a motivation behind these cycles. Language contact is shown to have played a significant role in the spread of negation systems. The result is a holistic account of language change in the domain of negation, developed from comparing the diachronies of languages across Europe and incorporating insights from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.

AbstractThis article investigates factors that underlie the discrepancies in article omission between Maltese English (MaltE) and British English (BrE), with reference to further ENL, ESL and EFL varieties. We investigate seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, languages, proper nouns, titles, institutions and common nouns. Our sources include text corpora, and web and questionnaire-based data. Our key proposal is that MaltE has innovated a rule that the definite article may be omitted when the uniqueness or identifiability of a referent is salient in context. Furthermore, MaltE avoids the definite article commonly when the referent is generic rather than definite. The resulting MaltE system is regulated according to fewer parameters than in BrE, but more consistently.

We report on an experiment designed to shed light on the factors determining which forms of the Maltese numerals 2–10 occur in specific contexts, noting that there is little consensus on this topic in the previous literature. We focus on the properties of plural nouns that determine whether a preceding numeral takes a ‘bare’ form, as in zewġ ‘two’, or a /t/-form, as in zewġt. The key finding is that the type of onset of the plural noun is the main determining factor, with number of syllables and perhaps also the sound/broken-plural distinction contributing secondarily.

We describe, and provide an HPSG account of, a hitherto little studied English construction (of which the title of the paper is an instance) involving an agreement mismatch: a partitive construction in which a plural nominal is apparently modified by a singular relative clause.

Sustained academic interest in contact-induced language change goes back at least to the late nineteenth century, when Hugo Schuchardt (1884: 5) famously opined that no language is entirely free of in uence from other languages (“es gibt keine vollig ungemischte Sprache”). Indeed, the ubiquity of language contact has always been apparent to anyone engaged in language documentation and description. Until recently, however, the phenomenon of contact-induced change has received relatively little attention from more theoreticallyoriented linguists. We can understand why this should be so if we consider the background against which modern historical linguistics developed. First of all there was the development of the Comparative Method by the Neogrammarians. For them it was natural that contactinduced changes should be marginalised, since these are necessarily complications to be abstracted away from when working out a language’s genetic af liation. Later, with the advent of structuralism in the 1920s, there was a signi cant shift away from the study of diachronic questions in general; and even when formal linguists began to take a serious interest in language change, starting in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Kiparsky 1968; Lightfoot 1979), the focus was squarely on changes that are not the result of language contact (i.e. ‘internally caused’ changes). Chomsky’s (1965: 3) in uential proposal that “linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity” doubtless had much to do with this focus on internally caused change. It was probably also connected to a widespread perception that, in the words of Lass (1997: 209), “an endogenous explanation of a phenomenon is more parsimonious, because endogenous change must occur in any case, whereas borrowing is never necessary.” If purely internally caused (= ‘endogenous’) change is in some sense logically prior to contact-induced change, then it is methodologically sound to begin with internally caused change, and only once we have made progress in understanding the mechanisms that underlie this, to then move on to contact-induced change.

(1) a) Don’t say nothing to no one. (nonstandard British English) [=standard English ‘Don’t say anything to anyone’.] b) What did you say? Nothing! [same interpretation as in standard English] (2) a) It-tifla ma rat xejn. (Maltese) the-girl neg see.prf.3fs n.thing ‘The girl didn’t see anything.’ b) X’rat? Xejn! what-see.prf.3fs n.thing ‘What did she see?’ ‘Nothing!’ (3) No one said nothing. (standard English) [double logical negation (¬¬p=p) in interpretation]

This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone','nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.