﹃語用論研究﹄ 第 20 号（2018 年）pp. 3-15
© 2018 年 日本語用論学会[Special Contribution]

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue:
Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond*Jonathan Culpeper and Daniel Van Olmen
Lancaster University

Affirmatives and negatives raise interesting issues for both grammar and pragmatics. This paper
focusses on the Early Modern English negatives no and nay, and their role in the questionresponse system. Using data from Shakespeare’s plays and corpus methods, we note the demiseof nay, and the specific uses and pragmatic meanings of no and nay. We conclude by discussing
our key findings in a broader theoretical and cross-linguistic perspective.

Keywords: negatives, affirmatives, question-responses, pragmatic-semantic change, Early Modern English

1.

Introduction

This paper sets out to cast light on the two key Early Modern English negatives,
no and nay, especially, but not exclusively, in their role as response tokens to yes/noquestions. It is broadly located in the field of historical pragmatics, a field that saw its
landmark publication in the shape of Jucker (1995) and has rapidly expanded since.
More specifically, it belongs to the studies that have considered historical dialogue (e.g.
Jucker et al. 1999; Culpeper and Kytö 2010). It also overlaps with grammar. In fact,scholarly comments on Early Modern no and nay, albeit very brief, seem to be confined
to grammar books (e.g. Blake 2002). This paper is a natural next step to follow workon affirmatives (Culpeper 2018). No and nay at first glance seem to be the antithesis of
yes and yea, and they do indeed, as we will note, have some characteristics in common,
notably the way in which they pattern after particular kinds of questions.
We begin this paper with some background. First, we set the scene by briefly describing some pertinent aspects of Early Modern English affirmatives, which parallel
negatives in some respects, and then go on to etch in the development of no and nay
before the Early Modern period, and also comment on the little that is known about
them in Early Modern English. Then we describe our approach and the data we select-＊

The research presented in this article was supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities ResearchCouncil (AHRC), grant reference AH/N002415/1.

3

02_Culpeper.indd 3

2019/02/28 15:27

4

語用論研究 第 20 号

ed — Shakespeare’s plays, principally those of the First Folio (1623). The next part ofthe paper is taken up with our corpus-based analyses. We will investigate the occurrence of no and nay after positive and negative questions, the meanings they express as
suggested by their collocational patterns, and finally a possible shift in the meaning ofnay. In our following reflections section, we conclude by engaging in some theoretical
discussion and draw comparisons with today’s question-response system in English andthat of other languages.

2.

Background2.1. Affirmatives
The pragmatics of present-day responses to yes/no questions allows for ambiguity.
Let us rehearse the reconstructed real-life example given in Culpeper (2018):(1)		Emily:
Didn’t you take my costume out of the washing machine?
			Jonathan: Yes.
			Emily:What?
As the up-take “what?” of the third turn makes clear, Jonathan’s response “yes” is unhelpfully ambiguous between a negative response and a positive response. A pragmatic
account is required to illuminate this interpretative ambiguity. A slightly developed version of the account given in Culpeper (2018) is as follows: Interpretation 1 (negative response): Yes, what you say is true, I didn’t takeyour costume out of the washing machine [Confirms the negative proposition in
the question. Note that the meaning ‘copies’ what was said in the question withappropriate deictic adjustment (‘didn’t you’ >> ‘I didn’t’).] Interpretation 2 (positive response): Yes, what you suppose is true, I did takeyour costume out of the washing machine [Confirms the positive proposition
generated as an implicature in context.]
Old English did not have this problem because it had two central affirmative forms,
gyse and gea, one of which was used to give a positive response to a negative utterance(i.e. use gyse for “Didn’t you …? Gyse, I did ...”), and the other of which was used togive a positive response to a positive utterance (i.e. use gea for “Did you …? Gea, I did...”) (cf. Wallage and van der Wurff 2013: 191). Culpeper (2018) refers to this patternof responses as the Germanic pattern. When did the Germanic pattern breakdown?
Contrary to comments in Crystal and Crystal (2002: 373), Culpeper (2018) found noevidence of a complete breakdown around 1600. Whilst by this time, yes was clearlyno longer restricted to following negative questions, yea never changed its role as an affirmative after a positive question even after that date. Yea declined, and yes expanded
its role as an affirmative response after a positive question. Around the middle of the

02_Culpeper.indd 4

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond

5seventeenth-century the Germanic pattern finally disappeared. Vennemann (2009) has
suggested that this breakdown might be due to contact with Celtic languages in Britain.
Today’s Celtic languages, such as Welsh, often avoid affirmative markers like these andinstead use such strategies such as modal answers (e.g. “Didn’t you take my costumeout of the washing machine?” / “I did indeed”).
2.2.

Negatives: No and nay
Many of the negative forms that are familiar today existed in Early Modern English — no, not, none, never, nothing, neither and so on. One negative form that is now
obsolete is ne ‘not’, though even in Shakespeare’s time it was rare.1 Another possibly
unfamiliar form used in Early Modern English is nay. Nay is in fact still used today
and with some frequency, but is largely restricted to northern English dialects. Of
course, whether these negative forms expressed different meanings and performed different functions back then is another matter. Of particular note is the fact that Early
Modern English no was regularly a determiner (e.g. I am no villain; love no man; thisis no place). Such cases are excluded from this study.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Old English no and its variant
na are cognate with Old Frisian, and formed from Germanic ne + o (meaning ‘notever’). In contrast to no, nay has a Scandinavian background, a fact that is unsurprising
given its prevalence in northern English dialects (the Old Norse and Old Danish speaking Vikings invaded and settled in the northern and eastern areas of England). It is cognate with Old Icelandic nei, Old Swedish næi and Old Danish nej, and formed from ne +ei (ay) (also meaning ‘not ever’). It is easy to see how a general sense of negation develops from the meaning ‘not ever’: ‘not ever’ entails ‘no’.
Today, no can be as ambiguous a response to a negative question as yes. By wayof illustration, let us re-work example (1):(4)		Emily:
Didn’t you take my costume out of the washing machine?
			Jonathan: No.
			Emily:What?
As with yes, this is also ambiguous, the two interpretations being: Interpretation 1 (positive response): No, what you say [(I) didn’t] is not true, I
did take your costume out of the washing machine [Disconfirms the negative

1

In Old English, typically preverbal ne was the only element required for the ordinary negation of aclause (e.g. ic ne secge ‘I don’t say’). This negator was felt to be in need of reinforcement in Middle
English, resulting in the two-part negation ne … not (e.g. I ne seye not ‘I don’t say’). By Early Modern English, the weaker first element had disappeared altogether, leaving us with not (e.g. I say not ‘I
don’t say’). This process is often referred to as the Jespersen Cycle and is very common in theworld’s languages (cf. Vossen 2016).

02_Culpeper.indd 5

2019/02/28 15:27

6

語用論研究 第 20 号

proposition in the question.] Interpretation 2 (negative response): No, what you suppose [I did] is not true, I
didn’t take your costume out of the washing machine [Disconfirms the positive
proposition generated as an implicature in context.]
In Early Modern English, the use of no and nay seems to be sensitive to whether apreceding question is positive or negative. Blake (2002: 161) comments: “Often nay
answers positive questions or statements and no negative ones”. Blake’s “often” raises
the question of how often. We will investigate whether we have any evidence that thispattern of use was beginning to break up in the period of our data. Aside from presentday scholars, there are comments made by Early Modern writers, for example: No answereth the questyon framede by the affyrmatyue [...] yf a man sholdeaske [...] is an heretyke mete to translate holy scrypture into englyshe […] hemuste answere nay and not no. But and yf the questyon be asked […] Is not an
heretyque mete to translate holy scripture into englysh. To this questyon [...] hemuste answere no & not nay. (Sir Thomas Moore, 1532, Confutation of Tyndales Answere, iii. p. clxxxi, quoted in the OED)Of course, the role of no and nay after yes-no questions is not the only consideration in the discussion of those words, as they appear in other contexts with other meanings and functions. Our exploration will have a fairly broad focus.

3.

Data

For obvious reasons, we need historical dialogic data for our study. The study of
Early Modern affirmatives used the Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560-1760. Here, wewill use Shakespeare’s plays. One reason for this is that we have access to texts prepared as part of the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project, a £1 million project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK (http://wp.lancs.
ac.uk/shakespearelang). Bringing the corpus approach into the heart of Shakespeareanstudies, this project aims to deliver fresh insights into Shakespeare’s use of language at
multiple levels — words, phrases, semantic themes, character profiles and more. The
key data are the 36 plays of the First Folio (1623), plus Pericles and The Two Noble
Kinsmen. One particular advantage of this data is that it has been coded for social status, which will enable us to examine systematically social patterns of use. The tool weused for all our analyses was CQPweb.

4. Analysis of Early Modern English negatives
4.1.

02_Culpeper.indd 6

Use of no and nay after questions
We analysed 100 randomized instances of no and a further 100 randomized in-

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond

7stances of nay occurring after questions in Shakespeare’s plays. Rhetorical questions(and questions answered immediately by the speaker who asked it) are excluded. Table
1 displays our results.
Table 1. No and nay after questions in Shakespeare’s plays
No

Nay

Following any (genuine) question

35

4

Following a negative question

80

What we see in Table 1 appears to be consistent with the Germanic pattern: only
no occurs after a negative question. However, what is also clear from Table 1 is that
nay hardly occurs after questions of any kind — a mere 4 instances out of 100. Thus,
nay is barely participating in the Germanic pattern at all. This was not mentioned byBlake (2002) (and that lack of mention cannot be accounted for by supposing that weare focusing on Shakespeare and Blake is not — he, as is clear in his book, very much
had Shakespeare in mind). But it is not the case that nay is generally rare in plays:
there are 898 instances of no and 602 of nay in the Shakespeare data.2 What the resultsin Table 1 mean then is that by Shakespeare’s time, or perhaps more accurately the timeof the First Folio (1623), nay was hardly functioning as a response token at all. In thefollowing section, we will examine the functions of both no and nay. In Section 5, we
will comment on the broader distribution of no and nay across multiple genres in Early
modern English.
4.2.

Collocates of no and nay
We analyzed the collocates of no and nay to tease out the meanings and functionsof no and nay in an empirical fashion. Collocates co-occurring with a 5-word span tothe left and the right of the node were retrieved using the Mutual Information association statistic with the minimum frequency set at 15. Table 2 displays our results.
 able 2. The top ten collocates of no and nay in Shakespeare’s plays in aT
5-word span (rank-ordered according to Mutual Information, with a minimum
frequency of 15)
No
no
or
?
say

2

02_Culpeper.indd 7

Nay
then
let
not
.

The figure for no excludes cases that belong to the relatively fixed pattern “whether or no”.

2019/02/28 15:27

8

語用論研究 第 20 号

sir
Lord
‘ll
not
good
:
.
my

if
me
?
be
you
will
he
I

Lat us first describe the collocational patterns of no. One feature of the tool CQPweb is that it does not ignore punctuation but treats it as a collocational token. Strikingly, we see ? : and . collocating with no. These are symptoms of a tendency of no tooccur after questions as a response token, to be turn-initial, and to be parenthetical. Example (5) is an illustrative example (collocates in examples are emboldened):(5)		Boyet. Do you hear my mad wenches?
			Mar.
No.
No appears as a collocate of itself; in fact, it is the strongest collocate. This seems
mainly to be a consequence of the repetition of no to intensify a denial of what the previous speaker said, as in example (6):(6)		Hal.
Yea, and you knew me, […]			Falstaff. No, no, no: not so […] (HIV,2.4)
The collocate not is mainly a symptom of two particular patterns. One is the use of noto agree with the previous speaker’s negative assertion, as in example (7):(7)		Fang.
If I can close with him, I care not for his thrust.
			Quickly. No, nor I neither: I’ll be at your elbow. (HIV2, 2.1)
The other pattern is to confirm the negative implication of the previous speaker’s negative question, as in example (8):(8)		Henry. And tell me then, have you not broke your Oaths?
			Sink. No, for we are subjects […] (HVI3,3.1)
The other salient group in the collocates of no involves Sir, Lord and good. These are
typically used as ‘polite’ forms of address to accompany refusals of or disagreementswith what the previous speaker said. Example (9) provides an illustration:(9)		Northumberland. Why is he not with the Queen?
			Henry Percy.	No, my good Lord, he hath forsook the Court […] (RII,
2.3)

02_Culpeper.indd 8

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond

9Turning to nay, amongst the collocates the full-stop indicates a tendency for nay to be
turn-initial, as in example (10):(10)		Julia.
			Lucetta.

You (Minion) are too saucy.
Nay, now you are too flat […] (TGV, 1.2)

The collocate ? suggests a slight tendency to act as a response token. However, manyquestions are not actually genuine questions. In particular, nay is used to amplify anegative assertion by constructing it as an answer to a question confirming or clarifying
what the previous speaker has said or implied. In these contexts, the sense amounts to‘indeed not’. Example (11) provides an illustration:(11)		Valentine.
			Speed.

Without me? They can not.
Without you? Nay, that’s certain […] (TGV, 2.1)

The collocates then and if point to a pattern whereby a conclusion is drawn from a negative premise — in effect, meaning ‘if not then’, as illustrated by example (12):(12)		Petruchio.
				I am sure sweet Kate, this kindness merits thanks.
What, not a word? Nay then, thou lovst it not […] (TS, 4.3)

They are also used to reject or qualify what has just been asserted and draw a conclusion from it, as happens in examples (13) and (14):(13)		Katherine.
			Petruchio.
(14)		Hotspur.
			Worcester.

I know it is the moon.
Nay then you lie: it is the blessed Sun. (TS, 4.5)
Good Uncle tell your tale, for I have done.
Nay, if you have not, to it again (1H4, 1.3)

Finally, it should be noted that quite a few of the collocates are pronouns: he, me, you
and I. Examples (15) to (18) illustrate each pronoun:(15)		L. Anne.
			Gloucester.
(16)		Richard.
(17)		Rosaline.
(18)		Dick.
			Cade.

Why then he is alive.
Nay, he is dead, and slain by Edward’s hands. (R3, 1.2)
Uncle give me your hand: nay, dry your eyes (R2, 3.3)
Play music then: nay you must do it soon (LLL, 5.2)
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Nay, that I mean to do. (2H6, 4.2)

We will return briefly to this particular set of examples in the following section. What
we can note now is that nay is being used to reinforce emotive, expressive and interpersonal meanings.
4.3.

No and nay: A distinctive feature of nay?
The collocation patterns for no resoundingly support its role as a response token.
Not only does it tend to be turned-initial and parenthetical, quite often following ques-

02_Culpeper.indd 9

2019/02/28 15:27

10

語用論研究 第 20 号

tions, but it denies, confirms something negative, refuses or disagrees with what the previous speaker has said. This pattern is not entirely absent from nay, but it is certainly
not as strong. Examples (11), (12), (16), (17) and (18) are not typical response tokens.
For one thing, all but (18) are in medial position. But more than this they all tend towards the expression of meanings that no does not express. In this respect, our final setof examples above, (15) to (18), but especially (18), bear further scrutiny.
We selected examples (15) to (18) to illustrate a shift in the meaning of nay thatcannot be seen in no. We repeat and re-number those examples below, but each time
have added a gloss to nay that attempts to tease out its meaning in context.
(19)		L. Anne.
Why then he is alive.
			Gloucester. Nay (=no), he is dead, and slain by Edward’s hands. (R3, 1.2)
(21)		
Richard. 	
Uncle give me your hand: nay (=moreover), dry your eyes
(R2, 3.3)(22)		Rosaline. 	Play music then: nay (=moreover) you must do it soon (LLL,
5.2)(23)		Dick.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
			Cade. 		 Nay (=yes, indeed), that I mean to do. (2H6, 4.2)
In example (19), nay rejects the previous speaker’s proposition, whether that previous
speaker’s proposition is construed as a declarative question or an assertion. It is
straightforwardly, then, a negative response token. Example (21) is not the same. Here,the sense seems to be ‘moreover’. One could describe this in terms of Gricean terms(e.g. 1975). The utterance ‘uncle give me your hand’ does not provide enough information for the current purposes of the talk, and is thus rejected by nay and repaired by theaddition of information, ‘dry your eyes’. We would suggest that nay has acquired, tosome degree, a conventional implicature, signalling that the information that precedes it
is insufficient but will be made sufficient by the information that follows. One mightcompare this with the classic example of an item carrying a conventional implicature,
the word but, which implies that what follows contradicts an expectation flowing fromwhat has preceded. Example (22) works in exactly the same way. Finally, example(23) differs from all the above examples. Although in turn-initial position and parenthetical, its sense is not that of a negative response token. Instead, that sense seems to
be more like an affirmative. Again, a Gricean treatment is one way of explaining this.
If what the previous speaker says is so obvious that it does not need to be said — it
breaks the maxim of quantity — then nay could be construed as rejecting its expression
and implying ‘it goes without saying’, i.e. ‘yes, indeed’.

5.

Broader discussion and conclusions

Let us first examine the whole question-response system, recapping some of thecomments made in Section 2, including those of Blake (2002: 160-162) on Shake-

02_Culpeper.indd 10

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond

11speare’s language. Following Pope’s (1972) pioneering study of questions and answers,
we can describe the distribution of nay, no, yea and yes in terms of the polarity of the
response on the one hand and (dis)agreement with the question on the other. The system is presented in Table 3.
Table 3. The question-response system of yea, yes, no and nay
Agreement
Positive polarity yea‘I agree: it is the case’(the question has positive polarity)
Negative polarity no‘I agree: it is not the case’(the question has negative polarity)

Disagreement
yes‘I disagree: it is the case’(the question has negative polarity)nay‘I disagree: it is not the case’(the question has positive polarity)

However, as pointed out in Sections 2.1 and 4.1, Table 3 does not seem to capture thefacts of Early Modern English very well. By this time, the original question-response
system had undergone some significant changes. Yea was still used, for positive polarity agreement (PA) only, but yes had already established itself as marking not only positive polarity disagreement (PD) but also PA. Nay was hardly an option anymore andno, the only possibility to express negative polarity agreement (NA), had already extended into negative polarity disagreement (ND). These developments have eventually
given us the Present-day English polarity-based system in Table 4.
Table 4. The question-response system of yes and no
Positive polarity
Negative polarity

AgreementyesnoDisagreementyesnoNote that Table 4 does not take into account the use of yes and no to respond to the potential implicatures of questions (see also Goodhue and Wagner 2018 on the variationof yes with no for PD and of no with yes for NA).
From a cross-linguistic point of view, the disappearance of the four-way distribution in Table 3 is not so remarkable. The literature on answers to polar questions in theworld’s languages is fairly limited and lacks a certain empirical precision (e.g. Pope
1972: 172-208, König and Siemund 2007: 320-322, Holmberg 2016, Moser 2018).
Yet, it is clear that systems with four different response strategies are very rare. Chaha,an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Ethiopia, has such a curiosity, according to Pope
(1972: 195). It relies on the forms nk, e and ba for PA, NA and DN respectively andrepeats the negative polarity question’s verb in the positive to convey DP (cf. Holmberg

02_Culpeper.indd 11

2019/02/28 15:27

12

語用論研究 第 20 号

2016: 62-79 on this so-called verb-echo strategy). Most languages appear to prefer amore economical two-way system, though (cf. Roelofsen and Farkas 2015: 386-387 on
the issue of economy). In a polarity-based one like in Table 4, the two forms mark thepolarity of the response. Yes, for instance, means that the response has positive polarity.
After a positive polarity question, it is then interpreted as expressing agreement and, after a negative polarity one, disagreement. In an agreement-based system like in Table
5, the two forms indicate whether the speaker agrees with the polarity of the question
or not. Lie ‘wrong’, for example, signifies disagreement. Following a negative polarity
question, it is understood as involving a positive polarity response and, following a positive polarity question, a negative polarity response.
Table 5. The question-response system of Japanese (cf. Moser 2018: 8)
Positive polarity
Negative polarity

Agreementhai ‘right’
hai ‘right’

Disagreementlie ‘wrong’lie ‘wrong’

There is, in other words, no real need for four different strategies. Language can do thesame job with just two forms, which obviously accounts for the cross-linguistic scarcityof the question-response system in Table 3. In the same vein, we can regard the ongoing change in Early Modern English as a reasonable evolution toward the more naturaland economical system in Table 4.
An intriguing aspect of the developments in English is where its two current polarity-based response tokens yes and no come from. Why did the forms originally used toanswer negative polarity questions survive and spread to positive polarity questions, asin (24)? As the latter type of question occurs more often than the former, we can assume that yea and nay were more frequent than yes and no. To our knowledge and surprise, there exists little to no research into the diachrony of question-response systems
in any language. So it is unclear whether the changes in (24) are common or not.
(24)		
yes = DP → DP & AP
			no = NA → NA & ND
Still, any future study of changes in question-response systems may want to consider
the role of Roelofsen and Farkas’s (2015: 388) markedness hierarchy in (25). In theirview, the four slots in the system differ in their degrees of markedness in the world’s
languages. NA and PD are more marked than PA and ND because they violate somenatural connection between the “positive” values of agreement and positive polarity response and the “negative” ones of disagreement and negative polarity response. In addition, PD is more marked than NA and so is ND compared to PA. The reason is that
disagreeing is a more conspicuous communicative act than agreeing.
(25)		PA < ND < NA < PD

02_Culpeper.indd 12

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond

13

Roelofsen and Farkas (2015: 386-388) also argue that there is a strong pressure formore marked slots to have a specific formal expression. This so-called realization need
would explain why many a language with an essentially polarity-based system, like
French and Dutch, have a special form for PD, as Table 6 shows.3
Table 6. The question-response system of Dutch
Positive polarity
Negative polarity

Agreementja ‘yes’nee ‘no’Disagreement
jawel ‘yes’
nee ‘no’What could the concepts of markedness and realization need tell us about English? The
developments in (24) both go from a more to a less marked slot in the hierarchy in (25)and led to a situation where PA and ND no longer had their own particular response tokens. This “expulsion” of yea and nay may not have been especially problematic,
though: the pressure for PA or ND to have a specific formal expression is weak. Imagine, by contrast, that English had evolved a polarity-based system with yea and nay.
Such a change would have involved the expulsion of two response tokens, yes and no,that were fulfilling the strong realization need of PD and NA. This development would
thus have gone directly against the pressures within question-response systems identified
by Roelofsen and Farkas (2015).4 Note, however, that this hypothesis requires verification and that more cross-linguistic research on the diachrony of question-response systems is therefore needed.
With respect to no and nay specifically, there may have been additional sociolinguistic reasons for the decline of nay. Culpeper (2018) reports that there is no evidence
for suggesting that yea was a more regional dialectal item than yes. In contrast, as noted in Section 2.2, we know that nay has an Old Norse / Old Danish background, rather
than Anglo-Saxon, and today is almost exclusively found in Northern English dialects.
We checked the distributions of no and nay across both gender and social status in
Shakespeare, but no significant differences emerged. However, we also checked theirdistributions across genres in Early English Books Online (EEBO) for the period 1560
to 1640, and a difference emerged. In EEBO, there are 701,809 instances of no in
5,405 texts, and 31,609 instances of nay in 3,159 texts. Those differences suggest thatnay is more restricted. Furthermore, no is fairly evenly distributed across genres: it occurs most densely in plays (3,405 instances per million words (pmw)), followed by poetry (3,093 pmw) and then texts on Protestantism (2,828 pmw), and so on. In stark3

Moser (2018: 34) suggests, however, that this phenomenon is mainly typical of languages spoken
in Eurasia and, more specifically, of the Germanic languages.
4
Of course, the actual change also resulted in a situation where PD and NA no longer had theirown particular response tokens. We would argue, however, that the situation was a more indirect effectof the evolution toward a more economical two-way system.

02_Culpeper.indd 13

2019/02/28 15:27

14

語用論研究 第 20 号

contrast, nay occurs most densely in plays (639 pmw), but then much less densely infiction (146 pmw), and even less densely in the other genres. Thus nay occurs mostdensely in the very genre, plays, that several scholars have argued to be most colloquial(e.g. Culpeper and Kytö 2000). It is also the genre, one might argue, that is most likely
to contain regional speech. In sum, in a period of increasing sensitivity to “standardizing” variants and their prestige (e.g. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003), it seems
quite predictable that nay will decline in general use.
Let us now briefly look at nay conveying not only ‘moreover’ in (21) and (22) but
also ‘yes, indeed’ in (23). The account given for these developments in Section 4.3,
with Gricean implicatures and their conventionalization, is perfectly compatible with established theories of meaning change (e.g. invited inferencing à la Traugott and Dasher
2002: 34-40). Still, the end result of ‘yes, indeed’ is quite remarkable: a marker of ND
originally that comes to express some kind of agreement with — as well as elaboration
on — a preceding positive polarity clause or, put differently, some sort of PA. Unfortunately, the lack of typological attention to changes in question-response systems makes
it impossible for us to assess how (un)common such an evolution is in language. Even
for English, a more in-depth study of nay seems desirable. The OED (s.v. nay adv.1 andn.) makes no mention and contains no examples of this response token’s PA-like function. This raises the question, for further research, to what extent the use of nay in (23)actually semanticized. Its “additive” function in (21) and (22), however, does get discussed in some detail. It is glossed as ‘or rather’, ‘moreover’ and ‘and even’ and characterized as “introduc[ing] a more correct, precise, or emphatic statement than the one
first made” (OED s.v. nay adv.1 and n. 4a). As (26) and (27) show, nay has this meaning in common with Present-day Dutch nee, which suggests that the development of additive semantics is relatively normal. Interestingly, nay also shares the meaning withyea, as in (28).
(26)		What follie, nay, what madnesse ‘twere to lift A finger vp. (John Ford, 1634,
The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck: A Strange Truth, i. sig. B2v, quoted in the OED s.v. nay adv.1 and n. 4a)(27)		Júist met het maken van een goede, nee fantastische eerste indruk, kun jeecht het verschil maken. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maak-van-je-sollicitant-een-fan-marthe-van-der-kint?trk=prof-post, accessed 5 December 2018)			‘It is precisely by making a good, no great first impression that you can reallymake the difference.’(28)		How wantonly, yea, and howe willingly haue wee abused our golden time.
(John Lyly, 1578, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt, f. 38v, quoted in the OED
s.v. yea adv. and n. 3)
According to the OED (s.v. yea adv. and n. 3), the distinction between the two words isthat yea emphasizes the addition’s “identity in substance” to the initial phrase while nay
stresses its “contrast in degree”. In other words, in (28), abusing willingly is presented

02_Culpeper.indd 14

2019/02/28 15:27

Historical Pragmatics and Dialogue: Early Modern English Negatives and Beyond15

as being of the same ilk as abusing with no regard for right or consequences. In (26),madness is put forward as involving a higher level of foolishness than folly. Assumingthat more data confirm this difference, we can attribute it to the PA and ND origins of
yea and nay respectively. As a marker of agreement, the former connects things thathave essentially an equivalent meaning. As a marker of disagreement, the latter links
things that need to contrast with one another in at least some respect.
References
Blake, N. 2002. A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Crystal, D. and B. Crystal. 2002. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion.
London: Penguin.
Culpeper, J. 2018. “Affirmatives in Early Modern English: Yes, yea and ay.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19(2), 243-64.
Culpeper, J. and M. Kytö. 2000. “Data in Historical Pragmatics: Spoken Interaction (Re)cast as
Writing.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (2), 175-199.
Culpeper, J. and M. Kytö 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction in Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodhue, D. and M. Wagner. 2018. “Intonation, Yes and No.” Glossa 3(1), 1-45.
Holmberg, A. 2016. The Syntax of Yes and No. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jucker, A. H. (ed.) 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Jucker, A. H., G. Fritz and F. Lebsanft (eds.) 1999. Historical Dialogue Analysis. Pragmatics &Beyond New Series 66. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
König, E. and P. Siemund. 2007. Speech act distinctions in grammar. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Volume 1: Clause Structure, 276-324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moser, E. V. 2018. Answers to Polarity Questions: A Typological Study. Stockholm: Stockholm
University MA dissertation.
Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change
in Tudor and Stuart England. London and New York: Pearson Education.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <http://www.oed.
com> (accessed 5 December 2018)
Pope, E. Norwood. 1972. Questions and Answers in English. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD dissertation.
Roelofsen, F. and D. F. Farkas. 2015. “Polarity Particle Responses as a Window onto the Interpretation of Questions and Assertions.” Language 91(2), 359-414.
Traugott, E. Closs. and R. B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vennemann, T. 2009. “Celtic influence in English? Yes and No.” English and Linguistics 13,309-334.
Vossen, F. 2016. On the Typology of the Jespersen Cycles. Antwerp: University of Antwerp PhD
dissertation.
Wallage, P. and W. Van der Wurff. 2013. “On Saying ‘Yes’ in Early Anglo-Saxon England.” Anglo-Saxon England 42, 183-215.

02_Culpeper.indd 15

2019/02/28 15:27