Abstract
In this paper we investigate the diachronic changes in negation and Emphatic Focus that are responsible for the distribution of negated adjuncts in Present Day English. These can occur clause-medially and clause-initially, but generally not clause-finally. While clause-initial negated adjuncts move to the left-periphery triggering Negative Inversion for emphasis, clause-medial negated adjuncts are argued to occur in their first-merged position as vP-adjuncts. We relate the inability of clause-final negated adjuncts to express sentential negation to the loss of Prosodic-movement and Negative Concord in the transition from Late Middle English to Early Modern English. The eventual loss of Negative Concord is related to the reanalysis of negative words from non-negative (i.e. [uNeg]) to negative (i.e. [iNeg]). Upon loss of Prosodic-movement, reanalysis of negative words as [iNeg] results in the rise of Negative Inversion to express Focus.
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Notes
Accessible at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/.
Throughout the paper, we adopt Zeijlstra’s (2012) notion of Agree, also known as Reverse Agree. Unlike Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree, where Probes scan their c-command domain for a Goal that can value (and thus check) an uninterpretable unvalued formal feature that the Probe carries, Zeijlstra assumes Agree to be upwards, i.e. with a Goal c-commanding the Probe. In the specific case of NC, this amounts to a Goal with an [iNeg] feature c-commanding a Probe with a [uNeg] feature, as shown in (10b).
Whereas other kinds of movement (e.g. wh-movement, DP-raising, etc.) are feature-driven, Prosodic-movement takes place for prosodic reasons. Other types of movement, e.g. Müller’s (2004) Edge Domain Pied Piping evacuation vP-movement (which has been argued to result in V2 structures in German), are also claimed not to be motivated by formal features. See also Richards (2016) for a critical discussion on the role of formal features as triggers of movement, and on the interaction of prosody and syntax.
Unlike English, Spanish does not have the option of placing nuclear stress in clause internal-positions to coincide with informational focus (Zubizarreta 1998).
Word-forms in post-medieval examples are taken not to require glossing to be comprehensible.
Such correlation is also discussed in Wallage (2012). Both Ingham (2007) and Wallage (2012) observe that in Middle English subject-verb inversion following clause-initial negated arguments and adverbials takes place regardless of whether there is NC or not. When NC involves not in ME and EMnE, no inversion is attested with clause-initial negative elements, but when NC involves ne, NI is attested with a clause-initial negative element.
Verse texts were excluded because the exigencies of versification could have affected the use of NC.
When an exceptional phenomenon is so rare in historical data, where grammaticality intuitions are not available, accidental error must be considered a likely explanation. We henceforth assume that the co-occurrence with not found elsewhere indicates grammatical regularity.
The conflict between the result of Prosodic-movement and the requirement of sentential negation to have scope over the vP can be envisaged as resulting from one of these constraints being ranked higher than the other (as in Optimality Theory): if assumed that the scope requirement of sentential negation is ranked higher than prosodic/informational alignment, Prosodic-movement will only apply if its output does not violate the higher-ranked constraint.
The Old Bailey Trials corpus is available at https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/. Reference numbers given will direct the reader to the texts. Accessed 27 March 2019.
Similar data are discussed in Tubau (2016) for Traditional Dialects of British English.
An anonymous reviewer points out that our analysis makes the testable prediction that those varieties of English that allow NC as part of their grammar should mirror ME in permitting clause-final negated adjuncts. While the 18th century data confirm such prediction, so do contemporary data, (i).
- (i)
The shit ain’t funny in no way.
(Retrieved from http://www.bluelight.org/vb/archive/index.php/t-496656.html. Originally posted in 2010).
Whether examples such as (i) are derived by means of Prosodic-movement or else contain the negated adjunct in a VP-adjoined position is an open question that must be left for further research. To answer such a question it would be necessary to investigate whether Prosodic-movement is observed in other contexts in contemporary varieties of English that allow NC. No such research is known to us.
- (i)
Reanalysis of neg-words and the sentential negative marker from [iNeg] to ¬∃ (neg-words) and to ¬ (negative marker) is assumed to have taken place after reanalysis of [uNeg]-neg-words to [iNeg]-neg-words resulted in [iNeg]-specified lexical items not engaging in Agree chains with [uNeg]-specified lexical items. We assume that this would lead to the formal feature [iNeg] being reanalysed as semantic negation (cf. Zeijlstra 2004).
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Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Indústria, Economía y Competitividad (FFI2017-8254-P, FFI2016-81750-REDT), and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (2017SGR634). We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the handling editor for comments and suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. All errors remain our own.
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Ingham, R., Tubau, S. The diachronic syntax of negated adjuncts in English. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 477–497 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09450-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09450-1