Indefinites, negation and Jespersen's Cycle in the history of Low German

This paper offers a formal account of the diachronic changes in the interaction between indefinites in the scope of negation and the expression of sentential negation in the history of Low German. Different types of negative concord develop at the different historical stages. Parallel to that, the language underwent Jespersen's Cycle. In addition, I argue that, against common belief, Jespersen's Cycle is at best indirectly related to the type of interaction between indefinites and negation. Changes in the type of indefinites used in the scope of negation arise due to changes in the lexical properties of the indefinites involved, not as a result of changes in the expression of negation. Conversely, changes in the type of indefinites do not trigger changes in the expression of negation

Wenn {aber} der Topf {aber} nun ein Loch hat ... : adversative aber in adverbial clauses in (historical) German

While the literature on adversative aber in German to date has almost exclusively focused on independent clauses, and at best treated its occurrence in adverbial clauses in passing as a variant of postinitial aber in independent clauses (M´etrich and Courdier 1995, Pasch et al. 2003), the current paper focuses on the distribution and interpretation of adversative aber in adverbial clauses. It is shown that aber can have two different scopes, either contrasting two clauses, or two smaller contituents. These scopes are shown to have different prosodic correlates. It is argued that aber occupies the specifier of a functional projection in the upper middle field, and that it interacts with the mapping from syntax to prosody. Some displacements are argued to be interface-driven, to enable constituents to reach or avoid positions where they can be assigned a (contrastive) pitch accent. The diachronic development of adversative aber is shown to interact with the diachronic development of the Wackernagel position for unstressed pronouns

Parsing the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG)

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Should a conditional marker arise ... : the diachronic development of conditional sollte in German

Like other Germanic languages, German has a modal verb that, when used in the protasis of a conditional, does not have one of the modal meanings it has in other contexts, but only seems to underline the conditional meaning. The current paper looks at the diachronic development of conditional sollen, and shows how the past (subjunctive) form sollte, particularly in V1-protases, is in the process of developing into a pure conditional marker. Following Breitbarth (2015) and Breitbarth et al. (2016), this development is analysed in a framework combining Roberts & Roussou's (2003) Minimalist approach to grammaticalization with a cartographic analysis of modality and conditionals based on Cinque (1999) and Haegeman (2010b)

The development of negation in Low German and Dutch

This chapter traces the development of the expression of negation and of indefinites in the scope of negation in historical Low German and Dutch