Positive No
In Shaetlan the little negative word no can also serve as a conversational tool. Words that have those kinds of functions are called discourse markers in linguistics, because they manage the flow and structure of discourse (conversation or communication). As a discourse marker the little negative no can actually mean something positive, as in:
– No, hit wis a splendid pairty! (‘No, it was a lovely party!’)
– No, I wis blyde tae see dem agein. (‘No, I was glad to see them again.’)
– No, de wir a really good turnoot. (‘No, there was a really good turnout.’)
Here the discourse marker serves to show a combination of agreement and positive emphasis. This is not unique to Shaetlan: similar functions for no can be found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) of over 1bil words, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) Meeting Corpus of 72 hours speech, and in the Fisher English Training Corpus of nearly 2,000 hours of speech. It seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon and the COCA data shows a sharp increase in this use since 1990. Overall this is an understudied feature that deserves more attention.
References:
Bower, Anna Mae. 2018. Yeah, no and no, yeah: An analysis of two discourse markers. Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Sen.Hons thesis.
Burridge, Kate & Margaret Florey. 2002. ‘Yeah-no he’s a good kid’: A discourse analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 22: 149-171.
Cieri, Christopher, Dave Graeff, Owen Kimball, Dave Miller & Kevin Walker. Fisher English Training Parts 1 and 2, Speech and Transcripts. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Davies, Mark. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 1 billion words 1990-present. Available at: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca (last access 13 Mairch 2023).
Janin, Adam, Don Baron, Jane Edwards, Dan Ellis, David Gelbart, Nelson Morgan, Barbara Peskin, Thilo Pfau, Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke & Chuck Wooters. 2004. ICSI Meeting Transcripts. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Lee-Goldman, Russell. 2011. No as a discourse marker. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2627-2649.
