Negative polarity as a trigger for the development of modal meaning

This paper investigates the interaction between negation and modality from a diachronic perspective, and focuses on the role of negative polarity as a trigger for the development of modal meaning in verbo-nominal expressions. In contrast with the spate of diachronic studies of modal verbs, the acquisition of modal meaning by verbo-nominal expressions has received far less attention (e.g. Loureiro-Porto 2010). Yet, studies of verbo-nominal expressions with no doubt (Simon-Vandenbergen 2007; Davidse et al. To appear) and no question (Davidse & De Wolf 2012) have revealed interesting interactions between (nominally expressed) negation and modal meanings, with lexicalization of the strings often preceding their grammaticalization.
In this paper, we will reconstruct the changes that led to the current modal and mirative (evidential) uses of expressions containing be/have + negative determiner + nouns need (1), and wonder (2).

(1) “Stop it! This is not easy for any of us . There is no need for you to make it even harder.” (WB)
(2) It’s no wonder Norwegians hunt whale. There’s nothing else left to catch. (WB)
It is hypothesized that across the pathways reconstructed it is negative polarity that triggered the development of grammatical (modal, mirative) meaning. The pilot study on need by Van linden et al. (2011), for instance, showed that the noun need is found in both positive and negative modal expressions, but that the negative expressions always have a larger share of grammatical (as opposed to lexical) uses than the positive ones. The pilot study on wonder by Matthijs (2012), in turn, showed that mirative meanings emerge in negative contexts ((it) is no wonder) in Old English already, with positive expressions being restricted to lexical meanings (e.g. ‘it is a miracle’). It is only in Late Modern English that structures with positive polarity begin to acquire mirative meaning as well. With negative polarity being the marked variant (even literally) within the polarity paradigm (cf. Horn 2001: ch. 3), the idea is that new meaning attaches more easily to a marked value that has a formal substance than to ‘nothing’.
More generally, it is assumed in this paper that the discourse-pragmatic function of negation, viz. to deny expected presuppositions in the mind of the addressee (cf. Langacker 1991: 132ff) is very similar to how modal expressions function (cf. Werth 1999), as well as mirativity, which involves denial of expectations in the mind of the speaker (cf. DeLancey 2001). These assumptions tie in with typological findings on the cross-linguistically recurrent link between negation and modal (or irrealis, for that matter) marking patterns (e.g. Mithun 1995, 1999; De Haan 2012). We thus believe that it is no coincidence that negative polarity in interaction with the specific nouns studied has a natural functional affinity with the various grammatical meanings the strings developed.
The data used for this study will be drawn from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE), Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, Second Edition (PPCME), Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, Extended version (CLMETEV), and the synchronic WordBanks Online (WB).

References
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