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Not on the edge The syntax and pragmatics of clause-initial negation in Swedish

In English

Författare

  • Johan Brandtler
  • David Hakansson

Summary, in English

The possibility of topicalizing sentential negation is severely restricted in the Germanic V2-languages. In this paper, we show that negative preposing was more frequent and less restricted in earlier stages of Swedish: approx. 8 % of all occurrences of negation are clause initial in Old Swedish, compared to less than 0.5 % in present day Swedish. We propose that this change in frequency can be traced to the syntactic status of the negative element. More specifically, we argue that Old Swedish eigh 'not' may function as a syntactic head and cliticize to the finite verb in [C-0]. This possibility is not open to the XP inte 'not' in Modern Swedish. In Modern Swedish, we argue that the restrictions on negative preposing instead are related to more general pragmatic restrictions on the information expressed in [Spec,CP]: according to our hypothesis, negative preposing is licensed by contrast.

Avdelning/ar

Publiceringsår

2014

Språk

Engelska

Sidor

97-128

Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie

Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

Volym

17

Issue

2

Dokumenttyp

Artikel i tidskrift

Förlag

Springer

Ämne

  • Languages and Literature

Nyckelord

  • change
  • Diachronic
  • Negation
  • Topicalization
  • Old Swedish
  • Modern Swedish
  • Spec
  • CP
  • Germanic languages

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISSN: 1572-8552