Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Discourse-novel use of the negation eigi/æigi in West vs. East Nordic

In this talk I investigate the dialectal and chronological variation of the negation eigi/æigi in early West and East Nordic. I claim that eigi/æigi, as a sentential negator, arose first in East Nordic and only later in West Nordic. As evidence for this, I show that there is a lag between eastern and western texts in the use of this element in discourse-novel contexts. Whereas æigi displays discourse-novel usage already in the Viking Age East Nordic runic inscriptions, such uses of eigi in the Prose Edda (West Nordic) seem to be unattested (whereas the older enclitic negator -a/-(a)t has managed to build a much richer pragmatic profile, including discourse-novel uses). Medieval attestations show the next phase in the development and appear to confirm my hypothesis about the lag between WN eigi and EN æigi.