Variation in world Englishes through the lens of negation

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a study of negation across varieties of English worldwide, with data derived from the Global Web-Based Corpus of English. Three general categories are explored: negative polarity-sensitive expressions (lexical verbs such as bother, and idioms such as give a damn); negators (idioms such as be not half bad, boilerplate no-collocations such as no worries, and implicit negators such as bugger all); and non-standardised features such as invariant don't and multiple negation. The findings provide support for the Inner Circle versus Outer Circle distinction, with results ascribable to such factors as evolutionary status, SLA phenomena, colloquiality, and tolerance of vulgarity. Further areal findings are suggestive of linguistic epicentrality.