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West Flemish Negation and the Derivation of SOV-Order in West Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Liliane Haegeman
Liliane Haegeman
Affiliation:
U.F.R. Angellier, Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3, B.P. 149, FR-59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq – Cedex, France. E-mail: l.haegeman@skynet.be
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Abstract

This paper focuses on the expression of sentential negation in West Flemish (WF), which it examines with respect to competing theories for deriving the West Germanic verb-final sentence pattern. The empirical adequacy of three hypotheses proposed to account for the verb-final order in the West Germanic languages is tested: (i) the ‘traditional’ OV analysis with head-final base structures; (ii) an antisymmetric approach with only head-complement order and without V-to-I movement; (iii) an antisymmetric approach with head-complement order, but with V-to-I movement and remnant movement of the projection containing the trace of V. Specifically, the question is asked to what extent these analyses capture the surface distribution of WF negation markers (niet, en and negative quantifiers). The paper shows that the traditional OV analysis is certainly adequate for the description of the data concerned. As far as antisymmetric approaches are concerned, a double movement analysis fares better than antisymmetric approaches without V-to-I movement. The paper also shows that, contrary to what has often been assumed, the WF morpheme en is not necessarily analysed as the head of NegP, the canonical projection to encode sentential negation, but that it could also plausibly be analysed as the head of PolP, a higher functional projection which encodes polarity.

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Articles
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , December 2002 , pp. 154 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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