NegP and negated constituent movement in the history of English¹

Abstract

Three types of negated constituent movement during the history of English -NegV1, Negative Inversion and Negative Movement -are linked to the role of NegP in the syntax of English up to the early Modern period, building on proposals made by Haegeman (1995), van Kemenade (2000) and Zeijlstra (2004). NegP is analysed as involving the presence of a Neg Operator, null in languages with a head negator. A high NegP licensed NegV1 in Old and early Middle English, the optionality of a Neg Operator in NegP triggered Negative Movement in Late Middle English until NegP was lost, and the loss of NegP in Early Modern English permitted Negative Inversion. The absence of NegP is proposed for the earliest attested stages of English as well as of other Indo-European languages, as a way of accounting for a stage where NegV1 and Negative Concord were absent. 1 We thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions aiming to clarify and improve the article. Thanks also go to Ans van Kemenade and Susan Pintzuk for their critique of some the ideas presented here. All remaining errors of fact and interpretation are our own.

'Nie sommer nie': Sociohistorical and formal comparative considerations in the rise and maintenance of the modern Afrikaans negation system

“…i.a. Haegeman 1995;van Kemenade 2000van Kemenade , 2011Wallage 2005;Ingham 2007;Breitbarth 2009;Haeberli 2011) than their Romance counterparts (somewhere within the TP domain; cf. i.a.…”

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

“…Corpus data show that the pattern in (2) arises during the Middle English period (1150-1500). Unlike other accounts (Nevalainen 1997;Ingham 2007), I will propose an analysis that extends to negative inversion in both Middle English (1150-1500) and Early Modern English (1500-1700). Under the analysis to be proposed, changes to negative inversion follow from more general changes to the scope properties of negative items.…”

“…He accounts for this incompatibility by adopting Zeijlstra's (2004) idea that negative concord requires the functional projection NegP. Specifically, Ingham (2007) proposes that negative concord between not in spec,NegP and a negative item within VP blocks movement of the negative item to spec,CP across spec,NegP not. In earlier periods, we find negative concord between a negative item and the negative head ne, as in (14).…”

“…Nevalainen (1997) and Ingham (2007) date its emergence to the sixtenth century. However, data from the PPCME2 provide evidence of this pattern as early as the thirteenth century.…”

“…Section 3 turns to syntactic accounts of negative inversion in earlier English (Nevalainen 1997;Ingham 2007) and Present-day English (Haegeman 2001). Nevalainen (1997) and Ingham (2007) link the rise of new patterns of negative inversion in earlier English to the loss of negative concord. However, in section 4, I present corpus data showing that the new patterns of negative inversion do not correlate with the loss of negative concord.…”