Yoko Iyeiri

Verbs of Implicit Negation and their Complements in the History of English

For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co. The principal focus of this book concerns various shifts of complements which verbs of implicit negation (e.g. forbid , forbear , avoid , prohibit , and prevent ) have experienced in the history of English. Forbid , for example, was once followed by that -clauses, while in contemporary English it is in usual cases followed by to -infinitives except in the fixed form God forbid that … Although a number of English verbs have undergone similar syntactic changes, the paths they have selected in their historical development are not always the same. Unlike forbid , the verb prevent is now followed by gerunds often with the preposition from . This book describes some of the most representative paths followed by different verbs of implicit negation and reveals the major complement shifts that have occurred throughout the history of English. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students specializing in English linguistics, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics.

Principal component analysis of turn-initial words in spoken interactions

The present study investigates turn-initial words in spoken interactions by using principal component analysis. The choice of turn initiators differs significantly in different settings. In formal settings like White House press conferences, the first person pronouns I and we are characteristically employed at the very beginning of utterances, while this tendency is not observed in less formal and more conversational settings. Other initiators relatively frequent in formal settings include: well, the, and no. Furthermore, our findings suggest that female speakers are inclined to link their utterances to previous speakers’ turns by using interpersonal initiators like vocative personal names (e.g. John, Gary, and David). On the whole, however, the factor of gender is much less significant than the factor of the setting. .................................................................................................................................................................................

To be different from or to be different than in present-day American English?

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

God Forbid!: A Historical Study of the Verb forbid in Different Versions of the English Bible

The present article discusses why the particular phrase God forbid alone preserves subordinate clauses (i.e., God forbid that...), even in Present-day English, whereas forbid normally takes infinitives with to. Apparently, there was an interesting gap of usage between the God forbid type and the other uses of forbid from the beginning, which is most outstandingly illustrated by the absence of expletive negation after God forbid. However, the decline of expletive negation in general from the later Middle English period onward made the gap smaller. God forbid could have merged into the development of the other uses of forbid if the expansion of the use of infinitives after the ordinary type of forbid had occurred slightly earlier.

Negation in Different Versions of Chaucer's Boece: Syntactic Variants and Editing the Text

This paper investigates negative constructions in five different versions of Chaucers Boece, discussing at the same time the editing of Middle English texts. The five versions are (1) C1 = Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.1.38, (2) C2 = Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.21, (3) William Caxton (ed.), Boecius de Consolacione Philosophie, (4) “The Boece”, in The Riverside Chaucer, and (5) Tim W. Machan (ed.), Chaucers Boece. (1), (2), and (3) are Middle English versions, whereas (4) and (5) are modern ones. The discussion reveals that C2 is older, at least in linguistic terms, than C1, which is again older than Caxton. This ordering is clearly visible in the quantitative analyses of single and multiple negation, and of the negative forms ne, ne … not, and not. Syntactic behaviours are consistent in texts which are a natural product without any conscious alterations. By contrast, Riverside and Machan are modern editions with conscious emendations. Consequently, they are often more archaic linguistically than any of the Middle English versions. It is virtually impossible to make successful syntactic restorations through editorial procedures, since syntactic features are quantitative in nature, and can be observed only in the entirety of the text. Finally, this paper examines the use of never, no, etc., which again confirms the same point.