The rise of right periphery either in English

Publication date: September 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 75Author(s): Debra Ziegeler, Eric Mélac, Volker GastAbstractThe history of either as a clause-final, right-periphery marker has seen little intensive research, apart from a few isolated studies such as Rullmann (2002) and Gast (2013). This is surprising, given the recent interest in parenthetical discourse items and the controversies surrounding their development (grammaticalization vs. pragmaticalization, and other debates). In the present study, it is first questioned whether right-periphery either (RP-either) could be categorized as a bona fide example of a discourse marker, and second, how a hypothesis emerged that 18th and 19th century prescriptivism motivated its sudden shift to become a post-negation, clause-final item, replacing the now non-standard, right-periphery neither (e.g. Jespersen 1917, Fitzmaurice and Smith 2012). The present study builds on the previous accounts, suggesting that the use of either as a clause-final additive focus marker had grammaticalized from a resumptive quantifier, post-posed in apposition and gradually renovating the former functions of clause-final neither in strong negative polarity contexts by a process of grammaticalization following co-optation (Heine 2013). The social stigmatization of right-periphery neither (RP-neither) as an example of negative concord at the time must therefore have been due simply to its resulting association with recessive, dialectal or non-s...
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research