Grammatikseminarium: Mikael Berger (Malmö universitet) Johan Brandtler (Stockholms universitet) och Eric Lander (Uppsala universitet) om "Three NOTs to untie: ej, icke and inte in the history of Swedish"

This talk has two parts. We start off by introducing our proposed research project, where the overarching purpose is to investigate, plot, and analyse the development of negation in the history of Swedish (c. 1200–2000). It is well-established that all the Scandinavian languages changed their default negator from ej to icke during the 16th century, and that Swedish successively changed from icke to inte during the 19th and 20th centuries. These changes cannot be purely lexical. As observed by various authors, all negators have to some extent survived and competed against each other over a rather long period in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Moreover, it seems that older negators develop specialized functions in their competition against newer negators. Such variation also clearly intersects with social variables like gender and class, but such topics are severely understudied in the area of Scandinavian negation.

The second part of the talk presents preliminary results from a comprehensive study of the various sentential negators attested in the Poetic Edda. We test a series of hypotheses from the literature on pragmatic differentiation, the core idea being that the status of a proposition as discourse-old or discourse-new at least partly determines the choice of negator. The literature on pragmatic differentiation is well developed for Romance, but Old Norse remains almost entirely unexplored.