No in the lexicogrammar of English

This paper analyzes the continuing uses of no in negative collocations in three varieties of English: Australian, New Zealand and British, using their respective ICE corpora. In all three varieties of English, the use of no as determiner in nominal phrase collocations far outnumbers its use in adverbial collocations, though the latter cluster high in the frequency rankings for both speech and writing. Comparative analysis finds that while Australian English makes more use of no as a reaction signal (No!) and its emphatic counterparts (e.g., No way!), the New Zealand English data present a wider range of freely formed no collocations, especially in writing. Thus the two southern hemisphere varieties diverge, with no increasingly fixed into Australian lexical idiom, while it remains a well-utilized syntactic resource in New Zealand English.

• Affiliations: 1: Macquarie University