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This chapter investigates the development of the expression of standard negation in historical Low German. Standard negation is taken to mean (one of) the productive means to reverse the truth value of a proposition in a language. It is shown that Old Low German uses a preverbal particle ‘ni/ne’ to express standard negation, and that it does not yet have a conventionalized reinforcer of the expression of negation, though there are incipient adverbial uses of the (negative) indefinite ‘(n)iowiht’ ‘any-/nothing’. In Middle Low German, the standard negator is ‘nicht’, while the old preverbal particle ‘ne/en’ is no longer capable of expressing negation on its own and soon disappears from negative clauses in the corpus. The present chapter statistically analyses the language-internal and language-external factors influencing this loss.

This chapter studies the patterns of interaction between negation markers and indefinites, and diachronic changes affecting this interaction. The chapter demonstrates that Old Low German in particular represents a type of interaction that has hardly been noticed so far in the literature, viz. the fact that there can be languages such as Old Low German with a negative head, but without negative concord. Negative concord is shown to only develop during the Old Low German period. It is furthermore argued that ‘negative concord’ (i.e. the multiple expression of negation with single semantic negation) should only refer to standard negators. This implies that Middle Low German had no negative doubling. The present chapter statistically analyses the language-internal and language-external factors influencing (a) the variation in the use of n-marked indefinites in the Heliand and (b) the language-internal and language-external factors influencing the loss of ‘ne/en’ in Middle Low German.

In this chapter, the development of the expression of standard sentential negation and of the expression of indefinite quantification in the scope of negation in the history of Low German is analysed using the account outlined in chapter 4. The clitic negation particle present at the start of attestation undergoes a lexical split when a new negative marker enters the language: it eventually loses its negation feature in negative clauses once the new marker becomes an unemphatic negator, but becomes a high C-related marker without sentential scope in exceptive clauses. As the new negator only partially matching the features of the n-marked indefinites in Middle Low German, the availability of negative spread, but absence of negative doubling is accounted for. It is shown how formal and functional external motivations restrict the application of the third factor principles, giving rise to the particular time structure of the Low German changes.

This chapter presents Low German as an instance of a language having undergone Jespersen’s cycle, and summarizes the status quaestionis, identifying the gaps in the previous research. Essentially, there is no diachronic study yet of the development of negation in historical Low German, looking at both Jespersen’s cycle and diachronic changes in the interaction between negation and indefinites, that spans the entire period of textual attestation from Old Saxon to the end of the Middle Low German period, when written Low German was replaced by High German. Also novel is the systematic study of the diachronic and geographic variation within Middle Low German, based on a corpus of charters and similar dated and localized documents. The chapter furthermore gives background information on historical Low German and the methods used, and it provides an outline of the book.

The expression of sentential negation follows Jespersen’s Cycle in the history of High and Low German, from a verbal clitic neg-particle (stage I) in the earliest stages of attestation via a bi-partite expression (stage II) to a free adverbial negator (stage III) in the present-day languages. Besides the expression of negation, also the interaction between sentential negation and indefinites in its scope changes, from the original verbal neg-particle co-occurring with n-free indefinites and the neg-particle co-occurring with neg-marked indefinites (Negative Concord) to neg-marked indefinites without a sentential negator, in the wake of the loss of the old neg-particle. Though these developments are largely similar, they happen at different speeds, and differ in points of detail.

The introductory chapter provides important background information for the readers of the volume. It describes the aims of the volume, which is the first comprehensive and concise generative historical syntax of German. However, the contributions are not only aimed at researchers in the field, but in giving a basic overview of the respective topics and relating them to more descriptive and traditional accounts, the book is also suited for academic teaching, e.g. as a central text book in courses on historical German syntax. The chapter then gives an overview of the syntax of German, introducing the topological model widely used in more traditional accounts and the generative analysis of German clause structure. Finally, it provides an overview of the history of High and Low German including information on basic grammatical features, the textual evidence and central reference books and digital corpora for each period.

Middle Low German (MLG) syntax is still relatively underresearched. One blank spot on the map is whether MLG allowed null arguments, in particular null subjects, and if so, of what kind. As recent research (Volodina 2009, 2011, Volodina & Weiß 2016, Walkden 2014, Kinn 2015) demonstrates that languages closely related to MLG did have null subjects in a form that no longer exists in Modern Germanic languages (Rosenkvist 2009), the current paper positions MLG in this respect. Updating Farasyn & Breitbarth (2016), we present novel data showing that MLG distinguished two different kinds of referential null subjects (RNS). We argue that MLG, while preserving the null-subject property from Old North-West Germanic to a high degree, was already in the transition to a topic-drop language of the modern V2-Germanic type. This paper provides an analysis of the licensing of RNS in MLG and of the factors influencing their occurrence.