Negation in Historical West Flemish and Hollandic: an Investigation of Resilient Preverbal Markers

PhD thesisThis thesis examines the development of negation in historical West Flemish and Hollandic, focussing on resilient preverbal markers within a socio-historical framework. In doing so, my study provides a more detailed discussion of the resilient preverbal marker ne/en than previous accounts have done, as well as an explanation of why certain negative markers developed the way they did in the history of West Flemish and Hollandic. The analysis is based on an extensive, purpose-built corpus that comprises data from six centuries – from the thirteenth until the eighteenth – and two dialect regions. The dataset, which is examined using a fine-grained, century-by-century approach, thus provides diachronic breadth as well as a contrastive view of dialectal variation. In the literature, six contexts have been identified in which preverbal ne/en remains resilient: exceptives, expletives, with certain verbs, with certain adjectives or adverbs, fragment answers, and rhetorical questions. The results will be analysed on the level of morphosyntax as well as on a sociohistorical level. Firstly, my study will offer an in-depth diachronic overview of the grammaticalisation of exceptives, will analyse expletive preverbal markers as NPIs that undergo analogical change, and discuss the fossilisation of fragment answers. Secondly, I argue that urbanisation in the thirteenth to fifteenth, and the seventeenth centuries, may explain the West Flemish development of ne/en in the context of adverbs and adjectives, as well as the shift from bipartite to single niet and the loss of expletive markers in the Hollandic data. In addition, I will show that standardisation and prescriptivism can account for the attestation patterns in fifteenth-century Hollandic and eighteenth-century West Flemish. Overall, my research argues against ‘one size fits all’ explanations for the development of negation, and instead emphasises the need for a multi-faceted approach, proposing individual analyses tailored to each type of negative marker in the data.Arts and Humanities Studentship awarded by Queen Mary University of LondonSchool of Language, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary UniversityThe Philological Society of the U