Negation and Negative Concord in Middle Dutch

Abstract

Medieval Dutch is interesting to students of negation, as well as historical syntax, because it underwent almost a full Jespersenian cycle of negation (cf. Jespersen 1917). Such cycles appear to reflect important tendencies of language change, and at the same time, they seem to be characteristic of systems of negation. Somewhat similar fluctuations from analytical to synthetic exponence in areas such as tense have of course been noted in the literature, but it is doubtful that they are as swift and comprehensive as the cyclic developments that many of the languages of Europe have encountered in the area of negation. Another reason to draw attention to Middle Dutch is the fact that it exhibits multiple negation of the kind that Labov (1972) has referred to as Negative Concord. And negative concord is a central topic in current syntactic theory, especially since Raffaella Zanuttini's work on the negation system of Romance (Zanuttini 1991). Let us first take a brief look at the Jespersen cycle, as it manifested itself in the history of Dutch. Earlier discussions can be found in Van der Horst and Van der Wal (1979), De Meersman (1983) and Burridge (1993), among others. For the sake of exposition, I cut up the historical development in three main stages: (1) clitic negation (involving a proclitic marker en or ne on the finite verb); (2) double negation (involving clitic negation and an additional negative adverb niet or other nword); (3) (nonclitic) negation expressed by niet or an n-word. A more fine-grained