On the Synchronic and Diachronic Status of the Negative Adverbials ikke and not.
Ken Ramshøj Christensen, Department of English, Aarhus Universitet

Workshop on the Syntax of English and the Nordic languages,
Ninth Nordic Conference for English Studies, Aarhus, May 27-29, 2004.

Abstract:
In all the Scandinavian (Germanic) languages, sentential negation can be realised as an adverb corresponding to the Danish ikke which is completely parallel to the English not. These languages fall into two groups when it comes to the licensing of topicalization of negation. In English and Danish, topicalization of ikke/not is not grammatical, whereas it is grammatical in Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. This could be taken to indicate a categorial difference in the status of the negative adverb; in English and Danish, negation seems to be an Xº, whereas in the other languages, it is an XP. Blocking effects on movement in phenomena such as wh-movement and stylistic fronting are found with both full and enclitic versions of negation, such as English not/-n’t and Icelandic ekki/-ekki, and therefore islands cannot be used as a test for XP vs. Xº status of the negation. I present data from of Middle Danish and Old and Middle English that show that topicalization of negation was possible in these earlier stages. This supports my analysis of ikke/not as XP.

Thus, assuming that negation has the same categorial status in all the languages, the synchronic variation in the licensing of topicalization of the sentential negation can be accounted for in an OT framework as the result of conflicting constraints. I present data from Old Norse as support for an analysis of diachronic change as the result of constraint reranking.