Negative concord in the language of British adults and teenagers

Abstract

Abstract Negative concord (NC) (e.g. I don’t know nobody in Havering) has been the focus of a considerable number of diachronic as well as sociolinguistic studies, mainly in terms of its pervasiveness in the most common varieties of English. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the topic by examining NC in the language of British adults and teenagers. The findings, based on the analysis of data from three comparable adult and teenager corpora, indicate that: (i) NC is much more frequent in teenagers than in adults; (ii) the language of teenagers shows a wider variety of NC patterns than that of adults; (iii) the number of multiple negatives (e.g. I don’t want nothing to do with you no more) is not as common as expected, and they are found mainly in the expression of teenagers; (iv) pragmatically speaking, NC structures may be used to accentuate a negative meaning, although they are often equivalent to single negatives.