Ontkrachte verwachting. Tweeledige negatie als literair procedé in de vroege zeventiende eeuw

Negation in Dutch gradually developed from two-part into one-part negation: ‘ik en kom niet’ eventually became ‘ik kom niet’. In seventeenth-century Dutch, both variants occurred, but not randomly: linguistic research showed that syntactic, social and geographical contexts could favor one variant over the other. However, this does not explain why different negations also appeared side by side within individual texts and bodies of work. Previously, we conducted research at the intersection of historical sociolinguistics, formal linguistics and literary studies, in order to demonstrate that semantic contexts also played a role in the use of these variants: in travel journals and letters, the bipartite negation was often used to emphatically negate an expectation shared by the author and the reader. In this article, we claim that this specific use of bipartite negation also functioned as a literary and stylistic device in poems by Jacobus Revius and in literary letters by P.C. Hooft. Bipartite negation can overturn firmly held beliefs or, conversely, reinforce expectations. We argue that insights into linguistic variation help us understand literature as an artistic form of expression and a source of meaning.