Mood alternation in German: Negation as a specific case of epistemic weakening

Abstract This paper is mainly about a unique case of syntactic epistemic weakening, i.e. the present subjunctive mood and its negation trigger in surface coordination. In contrast to modern colloquial German, which limits the use of the present subjunctive quite restrictively to root clauses, the older periods of German, Old and Middle High German, showed an extended use of the subjunctive beyond root, i.e. also in dependent structures. However, the semantically interpreted as well as the grammatical subjunctive got entirely lost in Modern colloquial, albeit not quite in Standard written German. The focus of this paper is the discussion of mood in early complex (subordinated or coordinated) negated sentences. Exploiting mainly the MHG text of the Lay of the Nibelungs, we focus on negated matrix structures, in superficially coordinated, but semantically dependent clauses. This suggests that the ne-particle in co-construction with the subjunctive on the predicate was used to code clausal dependence from the previous (negated) clause. In further course, in specific semantic constructions, the original Middle High German interpretability of paratactic negation and the consequent denotation of non-factual situations were lost and gave way to the pure syntactic coding of dependency. The triangle of triggers contributing to the complex phenomenon consists of 1. negation of different sorts and in various syntactic distributions, 2. dependency marking, and 3. indicative–subjunctive marking on the dependent predicate. The attempt is made to draw comparisons to other epistemicity triggers such as syntactic and lexical nonveridicals.