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Jespersen's Cycle


Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics, which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The term originated in the 1979 publication Typology of Sentence Negation by Swedish linguist Östen Dahl. Dahl coined it in recognition of the pioneering work of Otto Jespersen in identifying this pattern of language change .

The linguist Otto Jespersen began his book Negation in English and Other Languages with the words:

The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word.

The process has since been described for many languages in many different families, and is particularly noticeable in languages which are currently at stage II (both the original and the additional word obligatory) such as French, Welsh, and some dialects of Arabic and Berber.

The fact that different languages can be seen to be in different stages of the process, and that sometimes, as Jespersen says, the whole process can begin again after renewal, prompted Dahl to name the process "Jespersen's cycle". The observation was however made earlier, most noticebly by Antoine Meillet, who used the term 'spiral'.

There are three stages, labelled I, II and III:

In Stage I, negation is expressed by a single pre-verbal element:

(Examples from different periods of French, all from ):

In Stage II both a preverbal and a postverbal element are obligatory:

In Stage III the original preverbal element becomes optional or is lost altogether:

French is well known to use a bipartite negative, e.g. "Je ne sais pas" = "I don't know", lit. "I not know not". Welsh has a very similar pattern, "Ni wn i ddim, literally "Not know I nothing". In both languages, the colloquial register is at a more advanced stage in the cycle, and the first part (ne or ni(d)) is very frequently omitted. In formal Welsh registers, by contrast, ni(d) tends to be used without ddim. This is not true of formal registers of modern French, but the use of ne on its own survives in certain set expressions (e.g. n'importe quoi: "no matter what/anything") and after certain verbs (e.g. "Elle ne cesse de parler": "She doesn't stop talking").


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