Negative Objects, NEG-shift, and Cross-linguistic Microvariation
Ken Ramshøj Christensen, Aarhus Universitet

Workshop on Syntactic Microvariation,
20th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics,
University of Helsinki, Finland, 7.-9. januar 2004.

In the Scandinavian languages, negative objects undergo obligatory leftward movement to license sentential negation, i.e. NEG-shift, as required by the Negative Criterion (Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991). When the main verb is in V2 position, all the Scandinavian languages may have NEG-shift. In English on the other hand, NEG-shift is never licensed.

In clauses with compound tense, however, the Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: those that allow NEG-shift, e.g. Swedish in (1), and those that don’t, e.g. colloquial Norwegian in (2).

When the object is the complement of a preposition, the languages are further divided into those that allow preposition stranding, such as Icelandic, those that have pied piping, such as Faroese, and those that have neither, e.g. Danish.

I will present an analysis that accounts for the different degrees of restriction on NEG-shift, from English which never allows NEG-shift to (one dialect of) Icelandic that always allows it; the analysis will also account for the different strategies used to avoid such constructions in the other Scandinavian languages.