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

På svenska

Author

  • 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.

Department/s

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

97-128

Publication/Series

Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

Volume

17

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Languages and Literature

Keywords

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

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1572-8552