Negative existentials in Indo-European: A typological and diachronic overview

The investigation of the Negative Existential Cycle (Croft 1991) has focused thus far on individual languages and small language (sub)families. The current paper serves as a starting point to analyze change in negative existentials and to establish the stability of the various attested construction types in a larger language family, Indo-European. Our ultimate objective is to conduct a quantitative phylogenetic study and this is only possible by consulting a large sample of related languages. Our first step is to present a typological and diachronic overview of negative existentials in 42 languages including Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and the Indo-Iranian languages as well as Albanian, Modern Armenian and Greek. We find that the Romance languages in our sample are consistently Type A, while the Germanic languages are consistently Type A~B. Indo-Iranian is far more varied and the most promising branch of Indo-European in terms of providing evidence for relevant diachronic pathways. We speculate on the reasons for the stability of Romance’s Type A and Germanic’s Type A~B and conclude that further phylogenetic analysis of additional languages is needed from these branches as well as from Indo-Iranian. We present evidence for the coexistence of two distinct negative existential constructions in several Indo-Iranian languages and discuss how the interaction of two or more constructions may contribute to further change within the Negative Existential Cycle