Negation and the left periphery in Finnish

This paper investigates the effects of negation and contrast on Finnish word order. It is well known that prosodically focused, contrastive constituents only occur in certain syntactic positions in Finnish. However, many of these patterns are reversed in negative sentences when negation is preposed from its canonical post-subject position to a sentence-initial location. Corpus examples show that preposed negation is used to negate propositions which are old/known information to the discourse participants. I present a detailed analysis of the structure of the Finnish left periphery which makes use of this information-structural property in order to account for the seemingly surprising changes concerning the positions where contrastive constituents can occur.