A07
Pragmatic Functions and Effects of Register Variation and Switch: a Register approach to negation and polarity

Project A07 investigates three sets of related phenomena in varieties of English: negative concord, pleonastic negation, and register-sensitive use of negative polarity items. All of these phenomena involve clear alternations with links to social meanings, which make them a promising empirical domain for the CRC. The project will use a combination of theoretical, corpus, and experimental linguistic methods to investigate the grammatical and register-related factors in these alternations. The findings will make important contributions to the study of linguistic and register variants, and to an improved understanding of register and the relationship of register knowledge to grammatical knowledge.