고대영어 næfre의 통사적ㆍ문헌적 분석 - Helsinki Corpus에 의거하여

A Syntactic and Textual Analysis of Old English næfre: Based on the Helsinki Corpus

  The purpose of this paper is to examine the syntactic and textual properties of the negative sentence including næfre ‘never’ by means of the Old English (OE) section of the Helsinki Corpus. It was found that the multiple negation including næfre was three times as frequent as the single negation. About 97.6% of multiple negatives co-occurred with ne+Vfin; Only 2.4% co-occurred with nan, nænig, nawiht, nauðer, and the conjunction ne. No significant preference was shown between the linear order [næfre ... ne+Vfin] and [ne+Vfin ... næfre]. When næfre was used as the only negator, thirteen types of syntactic frames could be classified, some of which are ungrammatical in Present-Day English (PDE). Particularly worth noting was the widespread use of sentence-initial næfre preceding the subject. This paper also examined whether the option of single or multiple negatives has some correlations with, first, whether a certain text was verse or prose, second, what dialect the text was written in, and third, whether the text was a Latin translation or not. Dialect-types and Latin influence had no correlations with the two types of negatives, but the contrast between verse or prose did: verse preferred single negation to multiple negation in the ratio of 80.6% to 19.4%; prose preferred multiple negation in the ratio of 84.4% to 15.6%.