Multiple negation in Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales" as a marker of social status. A pilot study

Abstract

The aim of the following paper is to examine fragments of Geoffrey Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales", one of the most celebrated specimens of Middle English poetry, with regard to the presence or absence of multiple negation. Negative concord, as the structure in question is often referred to, was firmly ingrained in the language in the Old English period, and, having undergone some formal and syntactic modifications, carried into Middle English. The pattern of its decline in the latter parts of the 15th century is observed to correlate with the social status of the speaker, the change originating in the higher tiers of the society. Disfavoring negative concord possibly had sources in the administrative and legal language, the subtleties of which Chaucer, having held a number of official posts with the court and chancery, would have most likely been versed in. Consequently, the paper proposes to at least partly account for Chaucer’s choices as regards negative concord from a sociolinguistic perspective and establish a possible connection between the structure’s distributional pattern and the status of "The Canterbury Tales" fictional speakers, who come from very different walks of life. Other factors which may have informed or influenced the author’s morphosyntactic choices will also be mentioned.