The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Grammaticalization and grammar change 307In Classical Old English, the head of NegP is the negative marker ne; this is aclitic which is never separated from the finite verb. We will therefore treat it asa prefix to the finite verb, which is checked against the negative head, overtlyin clauses with syntactic V-movement such as those discussed in chapter 4,covertly in others. 9 (22) is a clause with syntactic V- movement: ne miht is basegeneratedas the head of the VP, and is moved overtly, to T 0 ,Neg 0 ,F 0 , and C 0(negative-initial sentences have V-to-C movement, as the reader will recallfrom chapter 4). Personal pronouns are checked in Spec,F; we have not furtherspecified the precise checking position for æt mot ut, but following the argumentof chapters 5 and 6, we will say that æt mot is checked in Spec,AgrO,and ut is perhaps in a predicate phrase. The element na in Spec,NegP is thereinforcing sentential negator. We are at stage 2 of Jespersen’s cycle here: theoriginal negative marker ne has weakened and is reinforced by a second negativeadverb na. This second negative adverb has a fixed position, as we saw inchapter 4, which is because it is overtly licensed in Spec,NegP. Because it hassuch a fixed position, it serves as an excellent word order diagnostic, allowinga clear view of possible subject positions: the nominal subject appears on theright of na, in Spec,TP, which we therefore assume is the position where nominativecase is checked; the pronominal subject, and other non-nominativepersonal pronouns as well, occur on the left of na, we assume in Spec,FP. Withrespect to the representation of negation, we therefore have clear empirical evidencefor a negative specifier na, and for a negative head ne, which in OldEnglish is an incorporating negative head in the sense that it forms a morphologicalunit with the finite verb, as we can see from the fact that, in the arrayof positions that the finite verb can occupy in main and embedded clauses inOld English, as discussed in chapter 4, the negative marker ne is always on itsimmediate left.The NegP format advocated here allows a principled view of the relativestrength or weakness of negative adverbs. As we will see in the material discussedbelow, negative adverbs ‘enter’ Jespersen’s negative cycle as independentconstituents that are checked against a specifier feature in Spec,NegP,just as nominal subjects check nominative case in Spec,TP, nominal objectscheck a case feature in Spec,AgrOP, and wh-constituents check an interrogativefeature in Spec,CP, to name a few parallels. The weaker of the negativeadverbs, which in Old English is ne, is an incorporating head; this amounts tosaying that it is syntactically and morphologically dependent, i.e. proclitic,upon another element, the finite verb. We would expect then that a diachronicpathway in the development of negation systems may be that independentconstituents that are checked in Spec,NegP are weakened to negative head9We will see below that in early Old English, negation can occur separated from thefinite verb.