Anne Breitbarth

The history of low german negation

While the development of negation has in recent years gained an increased interest in linguistic research, as witnessed by a large number of new publications, this development has not yet been thoroughly and diachronically studied for historical Low German, as the historical syntax of Low German more generally is only recently coming out of the shadows. The present study investigates quantitatively two empirical domains. First, the development of the expression of standard negation, or Jespersen’s Cycle, and second the changing interaction between the expression of negation and indefinites in its scope, giving rise to different types of negative concord along the way. The entire period of attestation from Old Saxon (Old Low German) to the point when Middle Low German is replaced by High German as the written language, after the completion of Jespersen’s Cycle, is taken into consideration. It is shown that the developments in Low German form a missing link between those in High German, English and Dutch, which are much better researched. The developments are analysed using a generative account of syntactic change combined with minimalist assumptions concerning the syntax of negation and negative concord.

The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Volume I: Case Studies

This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, including French, Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers, including negative concord and, where appropriate, language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives, negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume (to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes in negation systems of European and north African languages and set out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical frameworks. Readership: Historical linguists and their advanced students.

Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen

Abstract In spite of growing interest in recent years, the syntax of Middle Low German (MLG) remains an extremely underresearched area. In light of recent research showing early North West Germanic languages to be partial null subject languages (Axel 2005; Walkden 2014; Kinn 2016; Volodina/Weiß 2016), the question arises where MLG is positioned in this respect. The present article presents novel data showing that MLG had referential null subjects (RNS) and can be classified as a partial null subject language. Based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of their syntactic distribution, we argue that two types of RNS must be distinguished in MLG, null topics in SpecCP and null clitics on C.

Modality and negation in the history of Low German

Abstract The aim of the present paper is to study and account for the scopal interaction between modal verbs and sentential negation in historical Low German. A number of proposals concerning the scope of negation in clauses with modal verbs for other languages (mainly English) will be evaluated against the empirical findings from historical Low German. It will be argued that syntactic accounts of this interaction are not empirically adequate, and that a lexical account will have to be complemented by a pragmatic one in order to account for the behaviour and development of some modal verbs.

A (very) imperfect sandwich : English should, German sollte and Dutch mocht/moest as grammaticalizing markers of conditionality

Based on a comparative corpus study, the present paper contrasts conditionals containing the modal verbs sollte in German, should in English, and mocht/moest in Dutch. The conditionals are examined with respect to the linkage levels between protasis and apodosis, the tense/mood patterns in the two clauses, and the degree of syntactic integration of the protasis into the apodosis. We argue that sollte, should, mocht, and moest are undergoing a process of grammaticalization as markers of conditionality, understood as upwards reanalysis in the hierarchy of functional projections. We show that this grammaticalization process is at different stages in the different languages, not showing any sandwich-like pattern.