Pip is a hero-narrator of Great Expectations (1860-61). He is orphaned at a very early stage, and brought up “by hand” by his dreadful sister, the wife of the village blacksmith, Joe Gargery, to whom he is bound apprentice. Consequently he belongs to the working class, which is first evoked by Estella, a haughty young lady at Satis House, with whom he falls in love, and he is suddenly promised “great expectations” from a mysterious benefactor, so he decides to go up to London and turn himself into a gentleman. Pip with gentlemanly status in the metropolis considers Joe no longer to be his equal and becomes ashamed of Joe's lack of cultivation and his vulgar verbal behaviour. After the death of Magwitch, his real benefactor, he is once again poor and becomes ill and is devotedly nursed back to health by Joe, which makes Pip realize his true worth again. Our chief concern in this paper is to consider how Charles Dickens makes a stylistic choice to describe Pip's inner change in class-consciousness.

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Complexity is an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated a range of fields from physics to linguistics. Complex systems are made up of a large number of entities that by interacting locally with each other give rise to global properties that cannot be predicted or deduced from an even complete knowledge of the entities and of the rules governing their interactions. In many cases they are adaptive systems. Interesting principles have been proposed in an attempt to provide such an underlying, unified theory. These include selection, self-organization, scaling of the parameters, robustness, and networks of connections. In this study we show that lexical diffusion is the fundamental mechanism of language change, and it exhibits the underlying principles of complex adaptive system. First we discuss S-curve progress of language change, which is something like phase transition, and its snowball effect and relation to word frequency. Then we deal with linguistic selection, i.e., non-intentional functionally biased change and self-organization by language games, i.e., intentional, cooperative interactions of individuals in dynamic dialectology.

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English negative sentences developed as follows: (a) ic ne secge→(b) I ne seye not→(c)I say not→(d)I not say→(e)I do not say→(f)I don't say. This transition is argued to be triggered by the change in the syntactic status of not. With ne in Neg, not was first an adverb in the adjunct position of INFL' and served to semantically strengthen ne in Neg. Then, as ne became phonetically weakened, not came to occupy [Spec, NegP] in order to take over the function of ne expressing sentential negation. After the loss of ne,not came to occupy Neg and express sentential negation by itself. Finally, the contracted form of not,n't, appeared as a result of not being weakly stressed and encliticized onto do.

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This paper aims at investigating the situation of multiple negation in Victorian English from historical and sociolinguistic standpoints. The examples used as the data for this study were collected from ten Victorian novels.
Multiple negation is not common in the Victorian period and it is limited to dialogue. The majority of the examples are of double negation but those of triple negation are found, too. The most typical combination of multiple negation is the one with sentence negators not/-n't or never as the first element and another as the second.
Characters who use multiple negation vary in age, sex and class, but it is mainly uttered by lower-class people, and some lower-class men tend to use the form regularly. Upper-class people sometimes use the form when they are agitated or talk to people familiar to them. A similar tendency is also noted in the lower.

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In this paper I shall argue that not is neither a head nor a specifier of any maximal projection, but an adverbial modifier adjoining to I directly. The paper pursues this thesis from several pointsof view (VP ellipsis, HMC, I-to-C movement, and the strict adjacency of not to do/to), before briefly examining the historical changes of not. The examined data include negative subjunctive that-clauses (Section 2)and some archaic negative sentences (Section 3). By comparing various analyses of not and looking into the history of English negation, this paper defends the adverbial status of not in I against the dominant NegP hypothesis with not in its head. With a certain strategy, this status of adjoining not does not conflict with Potsdam's (1997) argument for VP ellipsis. Furthermore, Jespersen's (1917)historical cycle of negation can be naturally captured in the NegP-less clausal structure.

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[in Japanese]

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