Negation in the history of English. Edited by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie, and Wim van der Wurff. (Topics in English linguistics, 26.) Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. viii, 333. Hardback. 98.00.

Abstract

In recent years, the study of negation has motivated an impressive amount of work devoted to the study of the grammatical representation of sentential negation and its implications for syntactic and semantic theory (see the bibliography in Horn and Kato 2000 for a reasonably exhaustive compilation). The current volume includes twelve papers, the majority presented at a conference in Leiden in late 1994, that examine a range of intersecting issues in the historical development of modern English negation. While the papers are ordered alphabetically in the volume, they fall into two natural classes as defined by theoretical or descriptive orientation: four are explicitly directed to current issues in generative theory, while the remaining eight are of a more purely descriptive nature, although these papers contain sufficient detail to be of interest to practitioners of a variety of grammatical frameworks. I will briefly summarize the papers in the volume before commenting on selected points.