Negator vs. copula contractions in the history of American English
This study probes deeply into the two types of contraction i.e. we/you/they aren’t vs.
we/you/they’re not, he/she/it isn’t vs. he/she/it’s not, and I am not vs. I’m not in the history ofAmerican English, using the newly released corpus The Corpus of Historical American English(COHA), which covers the past 200 years in the history of American English, namely, from1810s to 2000s. The corpus-based survey provides the following results. Firstly, as a whole, thecopula contraction to the grammatical subject has become dominant over the counterpart
negator contraction to the copula. Secondly, the consequence of one constructional preference
over the other gives support for the view that language change is construction-based orconstruction-specific (cf. Rissanen 1998; see below). Thirdly, this transition implies that thenegative meaning may have been specified and emphasized over time by not contracting or
cliticizing the forms onto the hosts.
The following give more detailed descriptions of the survey results. In the case of are andnot, all the copula contraction forms i.e. we/you/they’re not have been used more frequently
almost at any synchronic stage than aren’t. Therefore, regardless of whether grammaticalsubjects are singular or plural, the copula contraction ’re not has strongly been preferred overthe negator contraction counterpart aren’t. In the third person singular forms i.e. he, she and it,
their preferred contraction patterns changed from s/he/it isn’t to s/he/it’s not around 1930s and1940s. As to the first person singular form, no examples of the negative contraction form i.e.
amn’t are found in the corpus (Hudson 2000; Dixon 2007). On the other hand, the gradualdiachronic shift from I am not to I’m not is consistent with those found in the other personforms. Figure 1 summarizes the transition of he isn’t and he’s not in COHA with normalized
frequencies per million.
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0Figure. 1: The transition of he’s not vs. he isn’t in COHA (Accessed June 27, 2010)
The outcomes of this survey can be interpreted as follows. Discourse-pragmatically, thenegative meaning has been strengthened with the gradual preference of the independent form
not instead of the contracted form n’t. In earlier English, one can witness a variety of lexicalitems that underwent univerbation with negative prefixes such as nyllan, nolde, neom, nyste,næfdon, etc., none of which have continued to exist across time. In a nutshell, the negative
particle or adverb not has been actualized for discourse-pragmatic effects, as Dahl (2010)precisely points out from a cross-linguistic perspective that a negator does not normally
undergo semantic bleaching. Morphosyntactically, the ways to contract either copulas ornegative particles appear to depend on types of construction. Rissanen (1998) demonstrates
through the analysis of various ‘interrogative’ constructions including copula contractions thatthe negator contraction increases over time in the history of English. On the other hand, thisstudy demonstrates that the negator contraction in ‘declarative’ constructions in the history ofAmerican English especially with copulas turns out to decrease.
References
Dahl, Östen. 2010. Typology of negation. In Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The expression ofnegation, 9-38. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dixon, R. M. W. 2007. Clitics in English. English Studies 88 (5), 574-600.
Hudson, Richard. 2000. *I amn’t. Language 76 (2), 297-323.
Rissanen, Matti. 1998. Isn’t it or is it not: On the order of postverbal subject and negative
particle in the history of English. In Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and van der Wurff,
Wim (eds.), Negation in the history of English, 189-205. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.