This large scale study of negation in English of the period 800-1500AD synthesizes three areas of linguistics: Minimalist syntactic theory, quantitative methodology, and textual study of data from two new large syntactically parsed corpora of Old English (Taylor 2002) and Middle English (Kroch & Taylor 2000). I integrate recent formal models of Minimalist syntactic representation (Chomsky 1995, 2000) with recent quantitative methods and models of change (Kroch 1989) to provide an economical and empirically defensible Minimalist analysis of changes in early English negation observed in progress across a large early English corpus. Quantitative data from morphosyntactic change in progress crucially establish the most appropriate syntactic analysis of early English negation and underpin a new model of grammaticalisation.
I present empirical evidence to distinguish three patterns of early English negation which are ordered in time to constitute Jespersen's Cycle (Jespersen 1917). These three stages are distinguished within a Minimalist syntactic framework (Chomsky 1995; 2000) using different morphosyntactic features. This approach accommodates the observed distribution of sentential negators in all early English clause types, unlike the accounts proposed by Frisch (1997) or van Kemenade (2000). I claim that grammaticalisation involves change in formal morphosyntactic features. My proposals distinguish two types of polarity head. One has LF interpretable NEG-features. The other does not have any LF interpretation. The Neg-criterion (Haegeman 1995) is reduced to a morphosyntactic feature checking dependency only applicable when the negative head does not bear LF interpretable NEG-features.
Quantitative evidence establishes the relationships between change in the position of negation in clause structure, change to the form of sentential negation, and change to the availability of multiple negation. A Minimalist approach to parametric variation provides a new perspective on the relationships between these early English changes, challenging previous accounts which link changes in the position of negation to Jespersen's Cycle (van Kemenade 2000) and which link changes in the availability of multiple negation to Jespersen's Cycle (Rowlett 1998).
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