New published article on ‘The grammaticalisation of 'never' in British English dialects’ by Dr Claire Childs

Posted on 5 May 2020

A new study investigating changes in English negation over time

Dr Claire Childs has recently published an article in Journal of Linguistics on grammatical change in English. It centres around the concept of ‘grammaticalisation’, a type of linguistic change where constructions change in form and meaning over time to become less like content words and more like grammatical markers.

The study focuses on the word never which has a number of different uses in English, including:

Type 1: “Not on any occasion” (Smith 2001) - referring to possible events over a period of time, e.g. I’ve never been to Paris
Type 2: “Window of opportunity” (Lucas & Willis 2012) - referring to a ‘single instant’ event (in linguistic terms, ‘achievements’) that could have taken place in a window of opportunity but did not, e.g. I waited in for the postman but he never arrived
Type 3: A non-standard use which can be used with a much broader range of events than Type 2, e.g. I never worked here at the time

The original function of never, Type 1, is found as far back as Old English. Never subsequently developed Type 2 uses which, in turn, led to the development of Type 3 uses - the most recent innovations (Lucas & Willis 2012). Dr Childs’ article asks: To what extent does variation in the use of never in present-day British English dialects reflect this historical development? Using data from speech recorded in three communities in Scotland and Northern England, the investigation used quantitative sociolinguistic methods to compare the use of never and didn’t in the two linguistic contexts where these are equivalent (Type 2 and Type 3).

The results reveal that speakers have a tendency to use Type 3 never to refer to ‘single instant’ events even though it can be used to refer to lots of other kinds of events. This shows that the grammatical restrictions on the use of Type 2 never (i.e. that it must refer to a ‘single instant’ event) have persisted over time as a variable constraint on the form’s newer Type 3 use. We also see a change in the communicative function of never in conversation. While Type 2 never expresses counter-expectation, speakers often use Type 3 never to explicitly contradict something that was previously said. Such patterns reflect the grammaticalisation process, as never has narrowed its time reference from longer periods to single instances, widened its contexts of use, and developed a more emphatic function.

“The results show that grammatical constraints on constructions we use in our everyday language can persist over a long period of time, sometimes centuries, and still have an influence on those items even if their meanings and contexts of use have changed.” - Dr Claire Childs, Dept. Language and Linguistic Science, University of York

Dr Childs’ research on never arose out of her PhD thesis ‘Variation and Change in English Negation: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective’ (2017). Her research interests are in grammatical variation and change in English dialects, combining insights from syntax and sociolinguistics. Currently she is the Principal Investigator on a project with Dr Carmen Llamas and Dr Dominic Watt called ‘“Geordie?”, “Mackem?”, “Smoggie?”: Dialect Differences in the North East of England’ which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (through their partnership with the British Academy).