*The goal of this paper is to propose an alternative interpretation of the diachronic development of the expression of negation known as Jespersen"s cycle as it is found in the West Germanic languages. Research to date has focussed mainly on the conditions behind the rise of the secondary negator. Much less attention has been paid to the fate of the original marker. The present paper focuses on the development of the original negation particle in the West Germanic languages English, Dutch, High and Low German and argues that at least in these languages, its weakening and reinforcement are related in a more complex way than is usually assumed and that functional redundancy due to the presence of two negation elements is not likely to be the reason for its loss. Rather, a shift in the licensing conditions of n-indefinites created a potential ambiguity of the original marker which fed into its reanalysis as a polarity marker at exactly the point when a new marker became available, by reanalysis of a previously and independently grammaticalised reinforcer. It is argued that the two reanalyses have to occur simultaneously, resulting in a hybrid approach to Jespersen"s cycle in West Germanic, as opposed to previous approaches under which one of the changes conditions the other. Cf. for why it should be called Gardiner"s cyle instead. I will stick to the more common term here. Cf. Jespersen (1917:11) on the weakening of not to n't and the effective creation of negative auxiliaries and Zwicky and Pullum (1983) on the status of n't as a special clitic.
Anne Breitbarth10 The development of conditional should in English This paper proposes an account for the development of English "conditional" should. It is shown by means of a diachronic corpus study that although should already had the conditional meaning in Middle and Early Modern English, should-conditionals show an increasing formal tense mismatch between protasis and apodosis over time. The proposed account of the syntax of conditional should combines Haegeman's (2010) analysis of conditional clauses with Kempchinsky's (2009) analysis of subjunctives. The diachronic development of conditional should is accounted for in terms of Roberts and Roussou's (2003) theory of grammaticalization as upwards reanalysis, combined with a more fine-grained syntactic structure (Cinque 1999). It is argued that should shows signs of developing into a conditional marker.
The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cycles), including the diachronic development of negative concord. In each case, there are relevant empirical observations across the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The book considers both language-internal and language-contact motivations for the changes observed, developing a generative account of the developments in terms of semantic change, reanalysis, and child-language acquisition, integrating insights from functionalist approaches that invoke language use as a motivation behind these cycles. Language contact is shown to have played a significant role in the spread of negation systems. The result is a holistic account of language change in the domain of negation, developed from comparing the diachronies of languages across Europe and incorporating insights from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.
Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be conducive to simplification, i.e. loss of such features. We sketch a programme for investigating this prediction. In particular, we suggest that the loss of bipartite negation in the history of Low German and other languages indicates that it may be on the right track.
Trotz wachsenden Interesses in den letzten Jahren ist die Syntax des Mittelniederdeutschen (Mnd) noch immer ein weitgehend unerforschtes Gebiet. Eine der bislang noch ungeklärten Fragen ist die, ob das Mnd Nullargumente, insbesondere Nullsubjekte, hatte, und wenn ja, welchen Typs. Der vorliegende Artikel stellt neue Daten vor, die zweifelsfrei belegen, dass das Mnd über referentielle Nullsubjekte verfügte, die zumindest teilweise eine Fortführung des altsächsischen Zustandes darstellen (vgl. Walkden 2014). Es wird jedoch auch gezeigt, dass das Mnd sich bereits im Übergang zu einem Topikdrop-System befindet, wie es in den gegenwärtigen germanischen V2-Sprachen zu finden ist. Dieser Übergang ist daran erkennbar, dass sich zwei Typen von referentiellen Nullsubjekten nachweisen lassen, die sich durch ihr syntaktisches Verhalten unterscheiden
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