ePrints

On Analysing fragments: The case of No?

Lookup NU author(s): Dr William van der WurffORCiD

Downloads

• Published version [.pdf]

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

This paper addresses the analysis of sentence fragments, specifically the English negative polar response item no. Two main types of synchronic analysis have been proposed for present-day English – one in which yes and no are syntactically inert particles which substitute for a clause, the other in which they are the initial element of an elided clause. Using diachronic data from 15th- to 17th-century English, we argue that the emergence of a novel other-speaker question pattern involving no demonstrates that speakers of early English analysed interrogative polar no as the initial element of a clause with TP-ellipsis. This novel pattern has received little attention in the literature, yet this grammatical innovation is interesting because its emergence demonstrates how diachronic change can be used as a diagnostic for underlying grammatical structure.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Wallage P, van der Wurff W

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Linguistics

Year: 2025

Volume: 63

Issue: 1

Pages: 55-113

Print publication date: 29/01/2025

Online publication date: 12/08/2024

Acceptance date: 16/09/2023

Date deposited: 28/01/2025

ISSN (print): 1613-396X

Publisher: De Gruyter

URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2022-0096

DOI: 10.1515/ling-2022-0096

Altmetrics

Share