영어 부정 표현에 대한 사적 고찰

This is a study on the changes in sentential negation in English, from Old English to the present day, in terms of Jespersen s(1917) Negative Cycle. The Negative Cycle is an assumption that negative adverbs are depleted lexical meaning and they undergo phonological 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 Nego.