In this article, the historical development of the sentential negation in English will be described and analyzed. Especially, the cyclic development of multiple sentential negation can be traced. It will be argued that the history of English negation has been shaped by the complicate interplay between various negation positions and strategies. In particular, Kemenade (2000)’s Negative Cycle is analyzed as a case of grammaticalization, i.e. the semantic and morphosyntactic weakening of an erstwhile independent constituent such as ne and its subsequent entrenchment in a system of grammatical marking. This type of change is regarded as a long-term, diachronic, and semantically motivated process. We will also analyse the development of sentential negation from the current generative theory. This is related to projecting such grammatical categories as tense and negation into independent syntactic constituents, each according to the standard phrase structure format. Furthermore, the FP, which accommodates the functional categories such as pronominal clitics and negative clitic, is postulated along with NegP. This approach allows a precise and insightful account of the historical development of English sentential negation.

In this article, the historical development of the sentential negation in English will be described and analyzed. Especially, the cyclic development of multiple sentential negation can be traced. It will be argued that the history of English negation has been shaped by the complicate interplay between various negation positions and strategies. In particular, Kemenade (2000)’s Negative Cycle is analyzed as a case of grammaticalization, i.e. the semantic and morphosyntactic weakening of an erstwhile independent constituent such as ne and its subsequent entrenchment in a system of grammatical marking. This type of change is regarded as a long-term, diachronic, and semantically motivated process. We will also analyse the development of sentential negation from the current generative theory. This is related to projecting such grammatical categories as tense and negation into independent syntactic constituents, each according to the standard phrase structure format. Furthermore, the FP, which accommodates the functional categories such as pronominal clitics and negative clitic, is postulated along with NegP. This approach allows a precise and insightful account of the historical development of English sentential negation.

negation, FP, negative cycle, grammaticalization, morphosynatactic weakening, functional category