David Willis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199582624
- eISBN:
- 9780191731068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.003.0005
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology
This chapter gives a minimalist analysis of the development of clausal negation in Welsh. It attests the familiar Jespersen's Cycle with negation: The Modern Welsh negative marker ddim descends from ...
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This chapter gives a minimalist analysis of the development of clausal negation in Welsh. It attests the familiar Jespersen's Cycle with negation: The Modern Welsh negative marker ddim descends from the Middle Welsh noun dim ‘thing’, which co-occurred as a minimizer with the original negative particle ny(t) before eventually replacing it. The chapter takes on the important question of the apparent gradualness of these developments, always a challenge to acquisition-based accounts of grammatical change. It argues that the ‘cycle’ in fact decomposes into a series of stages, with the crucial stages being those where some children reanalyze dim as an adverb, then as a polarity adverb, and finally as the bearer of the uninterpretable [Neg] feature in the clause. The switch in the locus of this feature brings a distinctively minimalist flavour to the analysis of an important diachronic pattern.Less
This chapter gives a minimalist analysis of the development of clausal negation in Welsh. It attests the familiar Jespersen's Cycle with negation: The Modern Welsh negative marker ddim descends from the Middle Welsh noun dim ‘thing’, which co-occurred as a minimizer with the original negative particle ny(t) before eventually replacing it. The chapter takes on the important question of the apparent gradualness of these developments, always a challenge to acquisition-based accounts of grammatical change. It argues that the ‘cycle’ in fact decomposes into a series of stages, with the crucial stages being those where some children reanalyze dim as an adverb, then as a polarity adverb, and finally as the bearer of the uninterpretable [Neg] feature in the clause. The switch in the locus of this feature brings a distinctively minimalist flavour to the analysis of an important diachronic pattern.
Chris Collins and Paul M. Postal
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780262027311
- eISBN:
- 9780262323840
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262027311.003.0020
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology
This concluding chapter reviews some of the more general theoretical implications of the argument presented in this book with regard to Classical NEG Raising (NR). It first considers the two types of ...
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This concluding chapter reviews some of the more general theoretical implications of the argument presented in this book with regard to Classical NEG Raising (NR). It first considers the two types of negative polarity items (NPIs), unary-NEG structures and binary-NEG structures (reversals), and the distinction between them, particularly the fact that only unary-NEG NPIs trigger Negative Inversion in Horn clauses. While it is often assumed that natural language negation (NEG) is a clausal modifier (negating the proposition denoted by the clause), this book has described a broad range of English NEG facts with no appeal to clausal negation at all, showing that the standard cases usually taken to motivate English clausal negation actually represent NEGs raised from verbal/adjectival phrases to a position right-adjacent to auxiliary. It has also discussed the idea of quantificational determiner phrase scope positions.Less
This concluding chapter reviews some of the more general theoretical implications of the argument presented in this book with regard to Classical NEG Raising (NR). It first considers the two types of negative polarity items (NPIs), unary-NEG structures and binary-NEG structures (reversals), and the distinction between them, particularly the fact that only unary-NEG NPIs trigger Negative Inversion in Horn clauses. While it is often assumed that natural language negation (NEG) is a clausal modifier (negating the proposition denoted by the clause), this book has described a broad range of English NEG facts with no appeal to clausal negation at all, showing that the standard cases usually taken to motivate English clausal negation actually represent NEGs raised from verbal/adjectival phrases to a position right-adjacent to auxiliary. It has also discussed the idea of quantificational determiner phrase scope positions.
