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COPYRIGHT 2004 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)
Gabriella Mazzon 2004: A History of English Negation. London: Pearson-Longman. 176 pp.
Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez Universidad de Santiago de Compostela iafeans@usc.es
It would be difficult to deny the existence of recurrent topics and research areas in English linguistics and, even more, in the general linguistic panorama. They are generally fields of study that stand out for their complexity and universality. They normally show relevant implications for the entire grammatical system and they tend to be susceptible of analysis from multiple perspectives and approaches. Without doubt, one of these major linguistic areas is negation. Several scholars (Jespersen 1917; Poldauf 1964; Horn 1989; Tottie 1991, Bernini, and Ramat 1992; Progovac 1994; Wouden 1997) to mention just a few, have already referred to the linguistic and extralinguistic reasons and factors that justify the study of negative polarity as it is connected not only with Linguistics but with a wide range of disciplines, such as Philosophy, Logic, Psychology and Mathematics. Horn (1989: xiii) refers to this question very graphically, affirming that the study of negation "has produced some of the most important linguistic discoveries (and arguably some of the most important linguistic errors) of thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Russell, Frege, Bergson, Jespersen, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle." Seifert and Welte (1987), in their thorough bibliography of negation, already listed over three thousand references, mostly bearing on negation in English, and this number has certainly been increased in the last two decades with many contributions dealing with the syntactic and socio-pragmatics of English negation at both the micro and macro levels of language. In spite of this, all grammarians interested in negative polarity are fully aware that there are still unresolved issues to be explored, such as the pragmatics of negation in both speech and writing, the constrast between no and not negation (as in they didn't see anybody vs. they saw nobody), the opposition between affixal and non affixal negation (as in He is not happy vs. he is unhappy), the nature and syntactic features of negative polarity items (NPI's), negative raising, negative transfer or not-transportation (as in Peter does not think Paul is coming to the party), problems related to the scope of negation with quantifiers (All the boys did not come is either paraphrased "Not all the boys came--but some did" or "None of the boys came"), negation and idiomaticity (as in Dont't put the cart before the horse; no gain without pain), the acquisition of negation in both native and second/foreign language, double and multiple negation (as in I didn't...
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