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# Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

**Authors:** Claire Childs · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Glossa: a journal of general linguistics **Link:** [glossa-journal.org/article/id/4968](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4968/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**59** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2772188041) openalex · 2026-10-19[Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://openalex.org/S4210226983)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287)
- [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/4968/galley/12429/download)
- [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.287](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2772188041)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Childs, Claire](https://openalex.org/A5066411271) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3205-018X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/50604078) · h 6 · 336 citations · 19 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper compares three ways of negating a clause with an indefinite: not-negation (*I didn't have any money*), no-negation (*I had no money*) and negative concord (*I didn't have no money*). The data are spoken, from informal conversations in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford. Two syntactic accounts are tested: Account 1 applies Zeijlstra's agreement theory to all three variants, and Account 2 derives no-negation by movement from inside the noun phrase. Tokens are coded for verb type, verb complexity and discourse status, and analysed with a chi-square test and a mixed-effects logistic regression. The variant frequencies differ across the three places (chi-square 26.64, 4 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001). No-negation is most frequent with existentials and with *be* and *have*, and rare with lexical verbs.

## Ideas

- I1. Turn the verb-type pattern into a rule in the generator for negative clauses: after existentials and *be/have*, prefer no-negation; after lexical verbs, prefer not-negation. Keep the choice and its reason in the rule. Measure the variant counts by verb class over the negative sentences of UD EWT, held in BTreeMap order.
- I2. Before claiming any dialect rule, run the paper's test: a chi-square over the variant counts per place. Add a shuffled-place-label control; if the test still finds a difference, the table is wrong.
- I3. Code discourse status (old information, new information) with a deterministic rule in `prag/src/frames.rs`, for example: a negated noun phrase whose referent was mentioned earlier. Check the coder against a hand-coded sample of at least 50 tokens before using its output.

## For Mova

The relevant chapters are [27. Negation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/27-negation/) (the three variants) and [08. National varieties](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/08-national-varieties/) (regional variation). The code is the polarity part of `prag` and `prag/src/frames.rs`. The measures: variant counts by verb class, the chi-square statistic, and the agreement of the discourse coder with a hand-coded sample.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.287](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287)

```
@article{childs2017integrating,
  title = {{Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English}},
  author = {Childs, Claire},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.287},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287}
}
```

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68. How to cite this article: Childs, Claire. 2017. Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 106. 1–31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.287) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/childs-2017-integrating-syntactic-theory-variationist-analysis/)
69. Submitted: 31 October 2016 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Submitted%3A+31+October+2016)
70. Published: 14 December 2017 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Published%3A+14+December+2017)
71. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)