Additive negation in Dutch, from synchrony to diachrony, cyclical and noncyclical
Johan van der Auwera, Daniël Van Olmen · 2025
Abstract This is a study of the synchrony and the diachrony of Dutch ‘additive negation’ strategies. ‘Additive negation’ is the negation expressed by neither … nor. The term ‘additive negation’ is argued to be better than its competitors. The synchronic part describes three types of constructions, viz. ones that use a synthetic form noch and ones that use an analytic construction involving either ook niet/geen ‘also not/no’ or min ‘little’. The diachronic part argues that the noch strategies are the oldest ones, followed by the ook niet/geen strategies and the min strategies. The chapter discusses to what extent diachronic changes can be considered cyclical and claims that the notion of ‘cycle’ has limited value here. Special attention goes to the origin of the min strategies: the chapter considers their additive negation uses to be a conventionalization of a context-dependent yet noncancellable meaning called ‘discourse entailment’.