On the Multiple Negation in Middle English through the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520551
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokiwa University
• Principal Investigator: ITO Reiko 常磐大学, 国際学部, 教授 (30151559)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 中英語 / 多重否定 / コーパス / フランス語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study aims primarily to clarify the French influence on the multiple negation in Middle English. The method used herein is to investigate the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, Second Edition (PPCME2) employing the Treebank1 as a search engine. Initially, the multiple negations are extracted using NEG as POS tag and ne and not with their variants as keywords for basic syntactic tags. Then the data are classified into (1)ne V, (2)ne V not, (3)V not, (4)ne V ADV and (5)ne V Q with parameters. Finally, the French influence on the negative constructions is analyzed comparing the three types throughout 4 periods of ME. The result shows that the use of the multiple negation, ne V not construction, which is relevant to French and Latin(F/L) in M2, is numerically large, compared to those constructions not relevant to F/L, although PPCME2 has fewer words in the texts in M2.

Free Research Field

英語学