INTRA-AND INTER- AUTHOR VARIATION IN NEGATION IN THE 17 th CENTURY DUTCH LETTERS AS LOOT

This article provides a qualitative study of variation in negation in 17 th century letters from people of different regions and social classes of the Dutch speaking area. This intermediate language stage between negative concord in Middle Dutch and single negation in Modern Dutch is affected by both bottom-up change (the negative clitic started to erode due to functional redundancy) and top-down change (some elite writers, like P. C. Hooft and Joost van den Vondel, started to omit the negative clitic completely). The letters display different surface varieties: optional deletion of the negati... Mehr ...