The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean

Anne Breitbarth is Associate Professor of Historical German Linguistics at Ghent University. She has published on issues in historical syntax and language change in High and Low German, as well as Dutch and English, and has led projects building parsed corpora for historical Low German and Southern Dutch dialects. She is the author of The History of Low German Negation (OUP, 2014) and editor of several volumes on language change in the domains of negation and polarity, as well as diachronic change and stability in grammar.Christopher Lucas is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Linguistics at SOAS University of London. His research centres on the description and analysis of grammatical change and linguistic variation, with a particular focus on Arabic, Maltese, and varieties of English. Much of his work has centred on issues connected with negation and definiteness, as well as the development of models of contact-induced change, with articles in journals such as Diachronica, Journal of Linguistics, and English Language and Linguistics.David Willis is Reader in Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He specializes in theoretical diachronic syntax and the historical linguistics of the Celtic and Slavonic languages. His publications include Syntactic Change in Welsh (OUP, 1998), The Syntax of Welsh (CUP, 2007) and Continuity and Change in Grammar (Benjamins, 2010; co-edited with Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, and Sheila Watts).

This volume can certainly be recommended... [A] generative account that does not omit the role of pragmatics and semantics in language change, that appeals to language contact as a motivator of change, and that, above all, is rooted in empirical observations, is an undoubtedly welcome addition to the field.

• 1: Introduction Part I: Jespersen's Cycle 2: Empirical generalizations 3: Internal motivations and formal approaches 4: External motivations for Jespersen's cycle Part II: Quantifier cycles and indefinites 5: Empirical generalizations 6: Internal motivations and formal approaches 7: External motivations for change in indefinite systems 8: Conclusion References Index of languages Index of subjects