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Description:
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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.
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