NEG-shift and Repair Strategies: Pied Piping vs. Preposition Stranding
Ken Ramshøj Christensen, Aarhus Universitet & Universität Potsdam
ZAS-Potsdam Workshop on OT-SYNTAX+, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft,
Berlin, 16-17 May 2003.
In the Scandinavian languages, negative objects undergo obligatory leftward movement to spec-NEGP
to license sentential negation, as dictated by the Negative Criterion (Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991).
When the main verb has undergone V2, all the Scandinavian languages 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 and those that don’t. When the object is the complement of a preposition, the languages
are further divided into those that allow stranding, those that have pied piping, and those that have neither.
I will present an OT 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, and I will also
account for the repair strategies in the other Scandinavian languages.