Old English Negators as Equivalents of a Clause

Abstract

In this article an attempt is made to find out how Old English (OE) negators vary in responses to polar questions and in polar-alternative questions, and how the negators function as reaction signals to express denial and refusal in OE prose. The corpus consists of all the occurrences of the negators na, nateshwon, nese and nic in the prose texts and glosses of the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC), supplemented with a select sample of occurrences of the particle ne. The data are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Despite the low number of occurrences of the five negators in polar answers, polar-alternative questions and as reaction signals, my study shows certain patterns in which the negators occur in the material. The results indicate that the negators are not intersubstitutable. Variation among the negators is mainly due to the immediate, syntactic environment in which the negator occurs. In addition, the variation is diatopic and genre-based rather than diachronic. The majority of the examples come from Latin-based texts.