21.1351, Diss: Historical Ling: Lucas: 'The Development of Negation in...'

Sat Mar 20 01:31:22 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-1351. Fri Mar 19 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.1351, Diss: Historical Ling: Lucas: 'The Development of Negation in...'

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1)
Date: 19-Mar-2010
From: Christopher Lucas < cbl23 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: The Development of Negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:30:36
From: Christopher Lucas [cbl23 at cam.ac.uk]
Subject: The Development of Negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic

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Institution: University of Cambridge 
Program: PhD in Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2009 

Author: Christopher Lucas

Dissertation Title: The Development of Negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic 

Dissertation URL:  http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/cbl23/research.html

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Language Family(ies): Afroasiatic

Dissertation Director(s):
David Willis

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis discusses diachronic developments in the expression of 
negation in Arabic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, focussing in 
particular on the set of changes known as 'Jespersen's Cycle' - 
prototypically the progression from preverbal to bipartite to postverbal 
negation - as well as the development of indefinites in the scope of 
negation. Drawing together data on negation from a number of 
neighbouring varieties of Arabic and Berber, as well as from Coptic and 
Modern South Arabian, this thesis defends from a linguistic and 
historical point of view the claim that bipartite negation in Arabic was 
triggered by contact with Coptic in Egypt, and separately with Modern 
South Arabian in Yemen and Oman, and that the same construction in 
Berber was in turn triggered by contact with Maghrebi Arabic. In light of 
the lack of an existing model of the psychological mechanisms which 
enable contact-induced grammatical change, as opposed to the 
sociolinguistic factors which constrain it, an account of these 
mechanisms is developed, integrating Van Coetsem's (1988, 2000) 
work on this topic with research on second language acquisition and 
first language attrition, as well as with acquisitionist approaches to 
(internal) change in general. This then enables an explicit account of 
the spread of bipartite negation in the languages under study. This 
account sees the bipartite construction in Arabic as the product of 
imposition (source-language agentivity) by native speakers of Coptic 
and Modern South Arabian, and its counterpart in Berber as the result 
of borrowing (recipient-language agentivity) by native Berber speakers 
from their second-language Arabic. The partial and complex 
progression from a bipartite to a postverbal negative construction in 
Palestinian Arabic is then examined in detail on the basis of original 
field data, in a case study of phonological input to syntactic change. 
Finally, the scope is widened to investigate a number of Jespersen-
type developments in the Semitic and Cushitic languages of Ethiopia, 
as well as the development of n-words and negative indefinites in 
Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic, Maltese and Hebrew, where it is 
argued that, contrary to initial impressions, only the latter two have 
developed into bona fide negative concord languages. 

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