Negation in the history of English: Middle English to the present day

Negation is one of my major research areas. I have been working on various aspects of English negation for the past 35 years, and published books and articles.

Books

Negative Constructions in Middle English (Kyushu University Press, 2001) is based on my research from 1989 to 2001 and discusses the historical development of English negative constructions with a focus on the Middle English period (1100-1500). The major part of this book examines the historical shift from the form ne alone through ne … not to not and various linguistic conditions that affected their choice. It also discusses negative contraction as found in nis (for ne is), nolde (for ne wolde), etc. The contrast between simple and multiple negation is also a major topic discussed in this book. For further details, see the page of this book.

Verbs of Implicit Negation and their Complements in the History of English (John Benjamins, 2010) is slightly different from the above. The focus of this book is on the historical development of verb complementation rather than negation, but it deals with a group of verbs of implicit negation, i.e. forbid, refuse, forbear, avoid, prohibit, prevent, hinder, refrain, fear, doubt, deny. The data derive from the Oxford English Dictionary quotation base. The period covered is mainly from Late Middle English to the present day. For further details, see the page of this book.

Aspects of English Negation (John Benjamins, 2005) is a book edited by Yoko Iyeiri. It includes eleven articles all discussing negation in English, from Old English to the present-day. It also includes a few articles on negation in contemporary English dialects. The book comprises the historical part and contemporary part. For details, see the page of this book.

Negative constructions in Middle English

Apart from the above books, I have published a number of papers and book chapters on negation in English. Those with a focus on Middle English include:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 1994. “Negation in the Brut“, in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise Le Saux, pp. 29-46. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 1998. “Multiple Negation in Middle English Verse”, in Negation in the History of English, ed. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie, & Wim van der Wurff, pp. 121-146. Berlink: Mouton de Gruyter. 
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 1999. “Ys the Lorde amonge us or not?:  Some Observations of or noon, or no, and or not in English Bibles and their Historical Development”.  American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 11(1): 89-102.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2002. “Decline of Multiple Negation in Middle English: The Case of Caxton’s Reynard the Fox“, in Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi, ed. Jacek Fisiak, pp. 121-27. Peter Lang.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2007. ”Decline of Some Middle English Features of Negation in the Fifteenth Century: A Study of The Paston Letters“, in Language and Beyond: A Festschrift for Hiroshi Yonekuraon the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Mayumi Sawada, Larry Walker, & Shizuya Tara, pp. 249-63. Tokyo: Eichosha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2008. “Unsupported Negative ne in Later Middle English”. Notes and Queries n.s. 55: 21-23.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2010. “Negation in Different Versions of Chaucer’s Boece: Syntactic Variants and Editing the Text”. English Studies 91: 826-837.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2010. “Negation in Fragments A, B and C of the Hunter Manuscript of The Romaunt of the Rose“, in Language Change and Variation from Old English to Late Modern English: A Festschrift for Minoji Akimoto, ed. Merja Kytö, John Scahill & Harumi Tanabe, pp. 79-101. Bern: Peter Lang.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “Cognitive Aspects of Negation in The Tale of Melibee, The Parson’s Tale, and A Treatise on the Astrolabe“, in Chaucer’s Language: Cognitive Perspectives, ed. Yoshiyuki Nakao & Yoko Iyeiri, pp. 5-25. Suita: Osaka Books.

The two articles published in 2010 use negative constructions as a scale with which to judge the date and style of English.

Also, the following paper, whose title does not reveal any hints of negation, include some discussion on English negative constructions among other linguistic features examined in this study. Its PDF is downloadable from its page.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2012. “Textual Transmission and Language Change in the Fifteenth Century: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of Higden’s Polychronicon“. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 51: 107-128. 2012. 

Negative constructions in the Modern period

I have also worked on negation in the Modern period. Some of my publications discuss negative constructions in particular authors’ writings. Also, the expansion of the auxiliary do in negative constructions is a major topic in this period.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 1995. “Multiple Negation in Early Modern English”. Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes (L’Association des Medievistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Superieur, France) 47: 69-86.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2004. “The Use of the Auxiliary Do in Negation in Tom Jones and Some Other Literary Works of the Contemporary Period”, in New Trends in English Historical Linguistics: An Atlantic View, ed. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño & Begoña Crespo García, pp. 223-40. Coruña: Universidade da Coruña.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Negation in Benjamin Franklin’s Writings: A Stylistic Analysis of his Autobiography and Letters”, in Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018), Takamatsu, Japan, September 17-19, ed. Yukio Tono and Hitoshi Ishihara, pp. 178-183.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Jespersen’s Cycle and the Expansion of Periphrastic do in English”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 57: 99-133.
• Iyeiri, Yoko and Mariko Fukunaga. 2023. “A Corpus-based Analysis of Negation in Selected 19th-century American Missionary Documents in Honolulu”, in Language and Linguistics in a Complex World, ed. Beatrix Busse, Nina Dumrukcic, and Ingo Kleiber, pp. 133-151. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi & Yasumasa Baba. 2015. “Negation and Speech Style in Professional American English”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 54: 181-204.

Negation and ideology

This is not a major field of mine, but I have written a paper on how people perceived multiple negation in the Modern period.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2025. “Comments on Multiple Negation in the Early Modern English Period”, in Language Ideology, Policy, and Practice: Focus on Minoritized Languages Past and Present, ed. Samantha M. Litty and Nils Langer, pp. 43-62. Oxford: Peter Lang.

This article includes a list of comments on multiple negation by language users in the Early Modern period.

Non-assertive forms such as any

Non-assertive forms such as any and ever underwent a gradual development from the Late Middle English period onwards. As these forms are strongly related to negation, I have been working on them and have published some papers in this field as well.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2002. “Development of Any from Middle English to Early Modern English: A Study Using the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts”, in English Corpus Linguistics in Japan, ed. Toshio Saito, Junsaku Nakamura, and Shunji Yamazaki, pp. 211-23. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2006. “The Development of Non-assertive any in The Paston Letters“, in Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology, ed. Michiko Ogura, pp. 19-33. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

I have also published a paper in Japanese on the use of any in Caxton’s Paris and Vienne.