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SUMMARY:Coordinate negation in Middle English - Richard Ingham (Birmingham
 )
DTSTART:20080319T172500Z
DTEND:20080319T182500Z
UID:TALK10154@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Anne Breitbarth
DESCRIPTION:Various aspects of the expression of negation are known to sho
 w discontinuity between medieval and modern English. Ingham (2007) conside
 red that the presence and subsequent loss of a nonovert negative operator 
 in SpecNegP (Zeijlstra 2004) succeeds in uniting negation phenomena of ear
 ly English contrasted with later developments\, including the loss of nega
 tive concord from the textual record of (educated) written English in the 
 Early Modern period (Nevalainen & Raumollin-Brumberg 1998\, Kallel 2004). 
 According to the Zeijlstra (2004) analysis\, Negative Concord grammars req
 uire the presence of a Neg operator. However\, the timing of the changes i
 n question could be thought problematic for this account\, since negative 
 concord persists well after the 14th century\, when according to Ingham (2
 007) the null negative operator was lost. Here we extend our investigation
  to the syntax of coordinate negative clauses in Middle English\, showing 
 that a change in the licensing of the negative coordinator _ne/nor_ occurr
 ed in the C14\nwhich should be attributed to the loss of the null negative
  operator at that time. In EME\, the coordinator ne introduced a negative 
 clause regardless of the polarity of the preceding clause\, e.g.:\n\n(1)a.
  Ne scule ghe neure god don unforgolden. Ne ec ne scule ghe nefre ufel don
 …\n‘You will never do good unrewarded. Nor either will you ever do evi
 l… ‘Lamb. Hom. 41\, 1\n\n(1)b. Ant he haueð iþolet us þe þolemode 
 lauerd ne we nusten hwet we duden. St. Kath. 42\, 8\n‘And he has suffere
 d us\, the patient Lord\, and we do not know what we did.’\n\n_And_ coul
 d also introduce a negated conjunct clause following an affirmative conjun
 ct clause\, e.g.:\n\n(2) Heore godmoderes scullen onswerie for hem… and 
 heo sculen beon bi-lefulle .Men. and heore bileue cunnen… and þis ne me
 i þe godfadres ne þe godmodres don. Lamb. Hom. p. 74-5\n‘Their godmoth
 ers should answer for them... and they should be devout men and know their
 \nfaith…. And this the godfathers and godmothers may not do.’\n\nBy th
 e C14\, _ne_ or _nor_ was tending to be used only the first conjunct claus
 e was negative\, e.g:\n\n(3) For þoo þat beþ in cloystre schulde not by
 si hem to vnderfonge gystes\, ne þey schulde not be distract to ministre 
 to þe pouere men.\n‘For those that are in cloisters should not busy the
 mselves with receiving guests\, nor should they\nbe distracted by looking 
 after the poor.’ De Inst. Inclus. 3\, ch. 13\n\nThis pattern becomes abs
 olute in the C15 data\, even in sources such as _Paston_ where NC between 
 indefinites\, with or without the clause negator _not_\, remained in force
 . Thus the form of the coordinator introducing a negative clause increasin
 gly depended by the late C14 on c-command. We take this to mean that a neg
 ative coordinator was no longer licensed by an element of the clause it in
 troduced\, following the disappearance from the syntactic structure of a n
 ull Neg operator. Up to the C14 it was syntactically licensed by an Agree 
 relationship with a negative element in the negated conjunct clause\, acti
 ng as the Goal of an Agree relationship\, as in Zeijlstra’s analysis of 
 clausal negation\; the local domain of negative concord extended to the Co
 njP (Johannesen 1998)\, as in (4a). Thereafter\, as with indefinites havin
 g an uninterpretable Neg feature\, it was licensed by an inverse Agree rel
 ationship (Roberts 2007) with a ccommanding negative element as the Goal\,
  as in (4b):\n\n(4)a. [CP ….. [ConjP ne [CP …. NEG ….. ]]]\n(4)b. [C
 P …. NEG ….. [ ConjP ne/nor [CP ….. ]]]\n\nThus a key change in coor
 dinate negation is shown to have taken place when the null Neg operator wa
 s lost\, in line with theoretical expectations. The deferred impact of the
  change on nitem co-occurrence\, however\, is attributable to the mediatin
 g effect of the lexicon\, where alternative entries for n-items (Ingham 20
 05) permitted co-occurrence of n-items with interpretable and uninterpreta
 ble features despite the loss of the null Neg operator.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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