A Semantic Syntax of Grammatical Negation in the Older Germanic Dialects

This study examines the morphological reflexes of grammatical negation in the older Germanic dialects, Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English and Old Icelandic. The term 'grammatical negation' is defined by the class of negative morphemes which are phrase markers in a transformational-generative grammar. A syntactic-semantic delineation of the negative operation is presented to determine whether the various morphological shapes which the negative assumes in the surface level representations pose a problem of synonmy at the semantic level.
Each of the older dialects is treated synchronically using the initial parameter of grammatical categories. Both syntactic and semantic procedures are applied to the corpus for each dialect. Syntactic insight is gained by generating the surface negatives from one underlying abstract category after Klima's (1964) model. Semantic information for the negative is obtained from surface level syntagms, composed of a negative morpheme and a given grammatical morpheme, e.g., the verb, noun, or adverb. The syntagm is then subjected to a feature analysus.
The data for all five older Germanic dialects show that the negative morpheme plus finite verb bears a high functional load with regard to sentential negation.