The Origin and Development of Negation in Infinitival Clauses

This paper investigates the distribution of negative infinitives in the history of English based on the data from historical corpora, and explores the origin and development of negation in infinitival clauses. It is argued that its origin is traced back to the constituent negator not which is adjoined to the whole infinitival clause as PP in Old English. Then, with the rise of functional categories T and C in infinitival clauses in Late Middle English, it was reanalyzed as sentential negation and NegP came to be projected above and below TP by analogy with finite clauses. Finally, it is shown that verb movement to T was lost in infinitival clauses in Early Modern English, leading to the same distribution of negative infinitives as in Present-day English.