Research project Three Nots to Untie: 'ej', 'icke' and 'inte' in the history of Swedish
This project aims to chart and analyze the development of negation in the history of Swedish, from Runic Swedish 'eigi' to present day Swedish 'inte'. The overarching goal is to provide a description of the changes involved in the rise and fall of these negators over time and relate their development to theories of language change and negation.
Three Nots to Untie: ej, icke and inte in the history of Swedish.
A curious difference between the Scandinavian languages concerns the standard negator: Swedish uses inte, whereas the others use ikke/ekke. The change in default negator from ej to icke is common to the early Scandinavian languages; Swedish goes further in changing from icke to inte. Neither the historical development nor the synchronic functionality of these elements is well understood.
The aim of this project is to investigate the development of ej, icke, and inte in the history of Swedish. The overarching empirical goal is to provide a detailed description of the changes involved in the rise and fall of the three negators over time and their respective functions in different stages of Swedish. The overarching theoretical goal is to develop grammatical analyses that both incorporate and test previous findings and hypotheses from the literature, focusing on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions of negation.
Project description
The overarching aim of this project is to investigate, plot, and analyze the development of negation in the history of Swedish. The project aims to address a number of empirical and theoretical questions that can be subsumed under two main research questions:
(i) why did icke replace ej as the predominant marker of negation in all of the Scandinavian languages, and
ii) why did inte successively replace icke in Swedish?
In this project, we aim to relate these shifts to changes in the syntactic and semantic functions of the three negative markers. By studying different genres and text types (from personal letters and diaries to novels, bible translations, and legislative texts), we also hope to elucidate the role that contemporary efforts to establish standardized written norms had on the choice of negative marker.
This project raises questions of both the synchronic and diachronic sort. As emphasized in previous literature, reanalysis of a negative marker to include a larger set of possible functions or contexts of usage can lead to an increase in token frequency; such a reanalysis marks not only the birth of a new default negator but also the replacement of an older negator. Interestingly, archaic negators seem to be able to survive by developing highly specialized functions. In modern Swedish, icke primarily functions as a constituent negation (e.g. icke-binär ‘non-binary’, icke-fråga ‘non-question’), whereas ej is used in prohibitions (ej tillträde ‘no access’). In this way, archaisms may fulfill particular syntactic and semantic roles, allowing them to ‘claim’ some minor territory in the grammar. This exact line of research is quite well developed for the Romance languages, while almost entirely lacking for Scandinavian.
The project will primarily build on corpus studies, covering the time period 1200–2000. Representativeness and accessibility are used as guiding principles for text inclusion. The representativeness principle states that each corpus should consist of samples that are maximally representative of the specific chronological variety of Swedish under examination. The accessibility principle demands that only texts which are digitally available and have been used in previous studies should be included. These principles facilitate data collection, annotation, statistical and linguistic analysis, and comparison with other studies.
Project members
Project managers
Johan Brandtler
Universitetslektor
Members
Mikael Berger
Senior lecturer
Eric Lander
Associate senior lecturer/Assistant Professor