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A study of religious prose texts
showed that negative inversion (NegV1), e.g. Ne drife ic hine fram me ‘I shall not drive him from me’ (St. Eufrasia, Ælfric II 338,69) was predominant in main clauses in Old English and Early Middle English but had disappeared by Late Middle English
14th century works, even in those retaining around 95% use of the ne negator. This phenomenon is related
here to the grammaticalisation of secondary negation. In OE texts a sharp asymmetry was found in the distribution of the secondary
negator na in favour of main clauses as against subordinate clauses. In EME subordinate clause contexts frequencies
of a secondary negator were quite similar across all clause types studied, which is taken to indicate that grammaticalisation
of the forms noht/nawt (‘not’) etc. was already underway. As a grammatical marker of negation, they stood
in [spec,NegP], unlike na in OE (contra van Kemenade 2000). In this position the secondary negator became able
to check an interpretable [+neg] specifier feature. This eventually replaced the OE grammar in which the interpretable [+neg]
feature was a head feature checked by the negative prefix ne. As a result
of this change, verb movement to C to check a strong but uninterpretable [+neg] feature (Eythórsson 2002) was lost in later Middle
English.
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