On syntactic and morphological negation in biblical English: A diachronic study

Abstract: The article deals with the development of negation in biblical English in the period from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. It explores the morphosyntactic features of negative clauses in Late Old English, Late Middle English and Early Modern English, on the basis of the three English translations of the Gospel according to John, composed after Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and the Greek original. The presented examples show numerous patterns of single and multiple negations, the latter being mostly negative concord, but occasionally with double negation as well. Additionally, the results obtained in the research are compared with the main points of Jespersen’s cycle in order to see to what extent negation in biblical texts fits in the general trends of the history of English.