Negative Movement and its Implication for Clause Structure |
Liliane Haegeman |
| Angellier-Université Lille/CNRS (France) |
| Abstract: The paper first provides a survey of the distribution of negative markers in West Flemish. The distribution of the negative head en will be shown to depend on licensing by Tense. Finite verbs move to T and hence en can be licensed, infinitives do not move to T and therefore are incompatible with en. West Flemish N-words are inherently negative. N-words with sentential scope undergo obligatory leftward movement. The distribution of N-words such as niemand ('nobody') etc. is also conditioned by case-requirements, and by their indefenite/quantificational property, whereas it would seem that the weak/strong opposition does not bear on their distribution. If the distribution of N-words with sentential scope is determined by the neg-criterion (Haegeman and Zanuttini 1991) (or its analogue in terms of feature checking (Kayne 1998)) the question arises how this specifier head requirement can be achieved in terms of the antisymmetric analysis of Germanic word order. I will argue for a double movement analysis of OV-orders involving movement of V to an inflectional head and remnant movement to a specifier position. Time permitting I will describe some constraints on negative concord. Unlike is the case in Bavarian, there is no adjacency condition on negative concord in West Flemish, but there is a parallelism requirement on the N-words entering in negative concord. |
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