Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history of English

Abstract

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject-verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008).

Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap

“…Many recent theories of NC model it as a syntactic Agree relation between negative elements within a clause (e.g., Zeijlstra, 2004; Puskás, 2012; Wallage, 2012; Espinal and Tubau, 2016; Tubau, 2016). Such theories are often motivated, at least in part, by the contrast between NC and so-called Double Negation (DN) constructions, in which each of two syntactic negations contributes a semantic negation.…”

Micro-syntactic variation in American English Negative Concord

“…That the shift has clear social motivations suggests that it was not a grammar-driven change. The proscription 3 Wallage (2012) uses the York Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al 2003), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (2 nd edition) (Kroch & Taylor 2000), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (Kroch, Santorini & Delfs 2004), and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Taylor et al 2006). against NC continues to pervade English speaking society, and is transmitted in home and academic settings as well as in the media. 4 In the next section, I summarize previous quantitative and experimental studies of NC in child English.…”

Negation and Verb-initial Order in Old English Main Clauses

“…OE is a negative concord language, which means that a negated clause may contain any number of negative elements, as in (1), but ne is the main OE negator, and it is usually used on its own for the purpose of sentential scope negation (Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman & van der Wurff 2000:54-55; Wallage 2012:6), as in (2).…”