Jespersen's Cycle

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An illustration of Jespersen's cycle in French

Jespersen's Cycle is a series of processes in

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 pattern was formulated in Otto Jespersen's 1917 book Negation in English and Other Languages,[1] and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation.[2]

Introduction

The linguist Otto Jespersen began his book with the words:[1]

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 noticeably by Antoine Meillet, who used the term 'spiral'.

The process

There are three stages, labelled I, II and III:[3]

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

jeo

I

ne

NEG

dis.

say

(Old French)

 

jeo ne dis.

I NEG say

'I do not say'

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

je

I

ne

NEG

dis

say

pas.

NEG

(modern standard French)

 

je ne dis pas.

I NEG say NEG

'I do not say'

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

je

I

dis

say

pas.

NEG

(modern colloquial French)

 

je dis pas.

I say NEG

'I do not say'

Examples

French is well known to use a bipartite negative, e.g. Je ne sais pas: "I don't know", lit. 'I not know not'. (The second negative element originally had a semantic connection with the verb: Je ne marche pas originally meant "I don't walk a step".) Welsh has a very similar pattern, Ni wn i ddim, lit. '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 with certain verbs (e.g. Elle ne cesse de parler 'She doesn't stop talking').

Spoken Brazilian Portuguese is also in differing stages of Jespersen's Cycle, depending on register and dialect. The original way to form a negative, as in most Romance languages, was the negative adverb não, as in Maria não viu o acidente "Maria did not see the accident". This pre-verbal não is usually pronounced in a reduced form, which lead to another não being used where negative adverbs usually go: Maria não viu o acidente não. Now, sentences without the initial reduced não can be encountered in colloquial varieties: Maria viu o acidente não.[4]

English too passed through Jespersen's cycle early in its history: for example "I didn't see" would be expressed in Old English as ic ne geseah; then strengthened with the word nauȝt (from Old English nawiht 'no thing') as Middle English I ne ysauȝ nauȝt; then leading to Early Modern English I saw not.[5][6] The same development occurred in the other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, which produced their respective postposed negative particles nicht and niet, first duplicating and eventually ousting the original preposed negative particle *ne / *ni.[7]

Modern English's do-support and contraction of "do not" to "don't" in colloquial speech could be argued as moving English back toward Stage I of Jespersen's Cycle—"I didn't see".

Palestinian Arabic creates negation through suffixation (e.g. /biʕrafɛʃ/ 'I don't know' lit. 'I know a thing') which comes from an earlier/alternate form of (/ma biʕrafɛʃ/ 'I don't know' lit. 'not I know a thing').[8][9]

Arabic varieties.[8][9]

The

Chamic languages, spoken in parts of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan, may also be undergoing Jespersen's cycle.[10]

Italian and the various Italian regional languages are also undergoing a similar transformation, where all three stages can be seen in action at once[

Western Lombard
, the archaic no l'hoo vist 'I haven't seen him/it' has long since become l'hoo minga vist or l'hoo vist no with no change in meaning (where minga ≡ it. mica).

References

  1. ^ a b Jespersen 1917.
  2. S2CID 145714042
    .
  3. ^ Lucas (2007)
  4. ^ Junior (2015)
  5. ISBN 9783110124316
    .
  6. ISBN 9789027212085
    .
  7. ISBN 9789027255013
    .
  8. ^ a b Lucas 2007.
  9. ^
    ISSN 1569-9714
    .
  10. ^ Lee, Ernest W. (1996). "Bipartite negatives in Chamic" (PDF). Mon-Khmer Studies. 26: 313.

Bibliography

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