This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks.

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Nestled in the town square of Concord, Massachusetts, the windows of the Colonial Inn have gazed upon more than three centuries of bloodstained history. Known for its role in the American Revolution, the Inn was originally built as three separate buildings with the oldest section of the property dating back to 1716. A stone's throw from Old North Bridge, the Inn is notoriously haunted by the ghosts from its Revolutionary War past. Guests report phantom footsteps, disembodied voices, and spirited soldiers lurking in the shadows of the labyrinthine hallways and empty rooms of this infamous inn. Local author Sam Baltrusis has worked the graveyard shift at Concord's Colonial Inn trying to unravel the chilling mysteries and lingering legends associated with one of the country's oldest and most haunted hotels.

During the first half-century of American independence, a fundamental change in the meaning and morality of ambition emerged in American culture. Long stigmatized as a dangerous passion that led people to pursue fame at the expense of duty, ambition also raised concerns among American Revolutionaries who espoused self-sacrifice. After the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of the federal republic in 1789, however, a new ethos of nation-making took hold in which ambition, properly cultivated, could rescue talent and virtue from the parochial needs of the family farm. Rather than an apology for an emerging market culture of material desire and commercial dealing, ambition became a civic project—a concerted reply to the localism of provincial life. By thus attaching itself to the national self-image during the early years of the Republic, before the wrenching upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, ambitious striving achieved a cultural dominance that future generations took for granted. Beyond the Farm not only describes this transformation as a national effort but also explores it as a personal journey. Centered on the lives of six aspiring men from the New England countryside, the book follows them from youthful days full of hope and unrest to eventual careers marked by surprising success and crushing failure. Along the way, J. M. Opal recovers such intimate dramas as a young man's abandonment by his self-made parents, a village printer's dreams of small-town fame, and a headstrong boy's efforts to both surpass and honor his family. By relating the vast abstractions of nation and ambition to the everyday milieus of home, work, and school, Beyond the Farm reconsiders the roots of American individualism in vivid detail and moral complexity.

This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale comparison of linguistic histories can offer.