To be or not to be? Or — to not be? Dochází ke změně v postavení anglické záporky not a infinitivního to?

• Authors: Sláma Jakub

Title variants

EN

To be or not to be? Or — to not be? Is a Change Taking Place in the Ordering of the Negator not and the Infinitive Marker to?

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

The paper notes that while grammars and other linguistic works assume that not precedes the infinitive marker to in English, one can quite often encounter the reverse ordering, to not. The second section provides an overview of the relevant literature. The third section compares spoken data from the British National Corpus and the Spoken BNC2014, and analyzes the written data from the Corpus of Historical American English, concluding that the frequency of to not (relative to not to) has indeed been rising significantly in recent decades. The fourth section attempts to identify some factors underlying this change, most importantly chunking and potential semantic differentiation. It is suggested that chunking might be an especially important factor affecting the change, but further analysis is needed, relying on more advanced statistical methods.

Keywords

CS

chunking; kognitivní lingvistika; kolostrukční analýza; konstrukční gramatika; rozdělený infinitiv; ¨syntaktická variace

EN

chunking; cognitive linguistics; collostructional analysis; construction grammar; split infinitive; syntactic variation

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Časopis pro moderní filologii (Journal for Modern Philology)
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 103
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 60-73

Contributors

author

Sláma Jakub

• Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR

Identifiers

DOI

10.14712/23366591.2021.1.3