Variation in Negation: The Behavior of the Negative Clitic in the Drenthe Dialect of Middle Dutch circa 1400

In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Drenthe verdicts over the period 1399-1405. The earlier finding by Van der Horst & Van der Wal (1978) that clitic drop is delayed in embedded contexts is not confirmed. Only when we make a distinction between lexical verbs & auxiliary verbs, the effect shows up in the case of lexical verbs. Clitic drop with auxiliary verbs, on the other hand, behaves in an opposite way: while neg-drop seems to be underway for auxiliaries in C & lexical verbs in clause final position, ne/en is absent with lexical verbs in C-position & auxilary verbs in clause final position. We argue that both effects are realizations of one process of morphological blocking. This is an absolute process. This process is similar in nature to the situation in English where the negator not/n't only combines with auxiliaries. This is often attributed to verb position in English: auxiliaries in the middle field, lexical verbs in VP. In a similar way it is possible to relate absolute drop to positional effects in Middle-Drentish: it is argued that non-realization of the neg-clitic is related to verb movement (Verb Second or Verb Raising). Particle verbs are used as a testing ground for the hypothesis. Apart from this absolute effect, there is an optional process of neg-drop that is argued to be the consequence of language contact. A crucial assumption in this article is that Middle-Drentish distinguishes auxiliary verbs & lexical verbs categorically, whereas no such distinction is present in other varieties of Dutch. References. Adapted from the source document