History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean : Case Studies

This is the first 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 first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation.

The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks.

David Willis is University Senior Lecturer in 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) and The Syntax of Welsh (CUP 2007) and Continuity and Change in Grammar (Benjamins 2010), co-edited with Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, and Sheila Watts.

Christopher Lucas is Lecturer in Arabic Linguistics in the Departments of Linguistics and the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East at SOAS, University of London. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the same institution, and prior to that a Research Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD on the development of negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic in 2010. His publications include Continuity and Change in Grammar (Benjamins 2010), co-edited with Anne Breitbarth, Sheila Watts, and David Willis.


Anne Breitbarth is a postdoctoral researcher in Linguistics at the University of Ghent. Her research focusses on Germanic historical syntax. She has previously held posts at Cambridge and Tilburg, where she completed her PhD on auxiliary ellipsis in Early Modern German in 2005. She is currently preparing a monograph on the development of negation in the history of Low German. Her publications include Continuity and Change in Grammar (Benjamins 2010), co-edited with Anne Breitbarth, Sheila Watts, and David Willis.