Negation and Verb-Movement in Romance: New Perspectives on Jespersen’s Cycle

Abstract

In this article we bring to light one additional factor underlying so-called Jespersen’s Cycle (JC) in Romance which has to date gone unnoticed, namely the varying position of the finite verb within the IP. More specifically, we show that there exists an empirical correlation between the availability of clause-medial/high verb-movement and Stages II–III of JC in which a postverbal negator is licensed. Drawing on novel data, we demonstrate that this correlation holds not only across modern Romance varieties, but also across early varieties. Formally, we explain this link between negation and verb-movement from the (in)active status of the T-domain and the consequent (im)possibility of donating a [Neg] feature to the lower v-VP domain. Although verb-movement in itself is not a sufficient condition to trigger a shift towards Stages II–III negation, we argue that it is a necessary one, a fact which explains the peculiar distribution of negation strategies across the Romània.

Exploring Microvariation in Verb-Movement Parameters within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance

“…Elsewhere, negation is either at Stage II, as in many northern Italian dialects, standard (written/formal) French, and Gascon, where negation is expressed discontinuously by both a preverbal and postverbal negator (70b), or at Stage III, as in many north-western Italian dialects, western/central Romansh, spoken French, Occitan, Aragonese, and northern Catalan dialects, where negation is expressed by a single postverbal negator (70c). In light of these distributions, Ledgeway and Schifano (2023) propose an original connection between each of these three stages and the extent of V-movement. In particular, varieties with simple preverbal negation (Stage I) may display either low V-movement (e.g., Cosentino) or high V-movement (e.g., some northern Italian dialects such as most Ligurian and Venetan varieties), whereas in varieties with non-emphatic postverbal negators (Stages II-III), the verb must raise to a high position (e.g., French and most northern Italian dialects).…”

“…Schifano 2015Schifano , 2018Ledgeway and Schifano 2022), both synchronically and diachronically (cf. Ledgeway and Schifano 2023), in terms of the role of factors such as finiteness (Groothuis 2020(Groothuis , 2022 and mood (Ledgeway 2009a(Ledgeway , 2022bLedgeway and Lombardi 2014), ultimately leading Schifano (2018) to relate such variation to the 'paradigmatic instantiation' of aspect, tense and mood in individual Romance varieties. Armed with these assumptions about a universal fixed hierarchy of adverb positions and corresponding functional projections broadly divided into the lower adverb space (LAS) and the higher adverb space (HAS), 1 we can now construct a fine-grained typology of Romance varieties along the lines sketched in (2a-c): Although in all three varieties exemplified in (2) the finite lexical verb invariably leaves its base position to vacate the v-VP complex, witness its position to the left of the very low completive adverb COMPLETELY immediately adjacent to the v-VP complex, it raises to different functional projections within the I-domain, as illustrated by its differential position with respect to different adverb classes.…”