History of German Negation

Book excerpt: This book represents the first comprehensive overview over the history of negation in German. It addresses both the development of the negation particles as well as the diachrony of indefinites in the scope of negation and the phenomenon of Negative Concord. Being based on a corpus study of several Old and Middle High German texts, it comprises a wealth of historical examples with additional comparison to Modern Standard German and dialects, as well as crosslinguistic data from a variety of languages. The findings are placed in the context of typological research and are analysed in terms of current syntactic and semantic theory of negation arguing for an unchanged underlying syntactic structure, with changes in the lexical filling of NegP and in the lexical features of indefinites resulting in crucial changes in the syntactic patterns of negation. This book is of interest to scholars of German linguistics, historical linguists, as well as anyone working in the field of negation.