Jespersen의 부정 순환과 중세영어의 문장 부정

Lee, Pil-Hwan. 2003. Jespersen's Negative Cycle and Middle English Sentential Negation. English Language and Linguistics 16, 105-130. This is a study of the sentential negation in Middle English in terms of Jespersen's (1917) Negative Cycle. The Negative Cycle is an assumption that negative adverbs had depleted lexical meaning and they underwent pbonological and morphosyntactic reduction to a bound morpheme prefixed to the finite verb. The history of English clearly supports this assumption. The issue is how to explain these aspects of changes. van Kemenade (1997a, 1997c, 1999, 2000) tries to account for the history of English sentential negation as a pure case of morphosyntactic change. It means that the change was triggered by structural factors. However, it is argued in this paper that the triggering factor for the change is the weakening of meaning. In other words, negative adverbs are morphologically and syntactically weakened to negative head status due to the semantic bleaching of negation and to the overlapping function in expressing sentential negation in NegP. The two positions in NegP inherently presuppose the functional redundancy in expressing sentential negation, so the specifier of NegP is generally weakened to Neg0.