The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

318 The syntax of early English(37) a. Didn’t they warn you?b. Isn’t history a social science?(38) a. Did they not warn you?b. Is not history a social science?The new pattern emerging in table 9.2, with the pronominal subject followingnot, should then be identified as the rise of negative contraction (this insightis due to Rissanen 1994, 1999), resulting from the emergence of not as a negativehead, hard on the heels of the loss of ne.What we have seen in this section then, is that through the history of Englishsentential negation, the behaviour of negative adverbs is narrowly structurallycircumscribed: in their variation and development, they remain preciselywithin the structural rigours imposed by NegP. When a negative adverb is aspecifier, it is positionally confined to Spec,NegP; when it is a head, it incorporateswith the finite verb, and positionally covaries with the finite verb. Whatis so striking is that the process throughout has tell-tale structural correlatesby which we can diagnose the precise morphosyntactic properties at each synchronicstage. We therefore conclude that the history of sentential negation isa prime piece of evidence for seeing that the grammaticalization process consistsof a series of synchronies: the gradual development is punctuated bysmall structural shifts which can be analysed quite precisely in the NegPformat assumed in this section. Inasmuch as we see a grammaticalizationprocess here, we see a cycle of lexical bleaching followed by reinforcement. Butthis development follows a course that is narrowly restricted by grammars ateach stage.9.3.3 Concluding discussionAbove, we have studied in detail two well-known cases of grammaticalizationin the history of English, and we have analysed them in terms ofgrammar change. Along the way, we have tried to show that they cannot besimply analysed as unidirectional, semantically driven, diachronic processes.At each synchronic stage, the syntactic shape of the grammar plays a structurallywell-defined role. In both cases, there is semantic bleaching of lexicalcontent, but this does not mean that the development is semantically driven.In the case of have to, the general word order change towards fixed VO wordorder discussed in chapter 5 plays a pivotal role in the sense that it cruciallyled to the adjacency required for the reanalysis of have to from main verb toauxiliary. Similarly, in the development of negation, the NegP format hasthroughout been a precise structural factor. By this, we do not mean to