Middle Low German (MLG) underwent Jespersen’s Cycle, a change in the expression of sentential negation, whereby a preverbal marker ni (stage I) was adjoined by an adverbial niht (stage II) in the transition towards MLG, and was eventually replaced by it (stage III). In this article, I argue that the single preverbal particle ne/en in MLG became a marker of negation which is located syntactically higher, i. e. above the clause boundary, than the clause in which ne/en appears. This analysis is based on a corpus study investigating MLG exceptive clauses (English unless-clauses). Both on semantic and syntactic grounds, it is shown that these clauses can be explained as being complements of an operator that subtracts the proposition in the exceptive clause from the modal domain of a universal quantifier.

The notion of ‘linguistic cycle’ has long been recognized as being relevant to the descriptions of many processes of language change. In a process known as grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning as well as some of its phonological content, and then gradually weakens, until it ultimately vanishes. This process of change becomes cyclic when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can develop along exactly the same pathway. This volume unites thirteen chapters which address aspects of cyclical change from a wide variety of empirical perspectives. Couched in the generative framework, the contributions to this book bear witness to the rapidly growing interest among Chomskyan syntacticians in the phenomenon of grammaticalization. Topics touched upon include, but are not limited to, the diachrony of negation (in the context of, but also beyond, Jespersen’s Cycle), the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical changes in argument structure, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. One conclusion that transpires is that the correlation between cyclical change and grammaticalization—though undeniable—is perhaps less strong than sometimes assumed. Given its emphasis on empirical data description and theoretical analysis, Cycles in Language Change will be of interest to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based frameworks, and more broadly to scholars interested in language variation and change.

The notion of ‘linguistic cycle’ has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. This introduction deals with different phenomena of cyclical change, making clear that while grammaticalization is one area where cyclical change can be found, it is not the only one. The chapter provides an overview of the theoretical literature about cyclical change, with particular emphasis on a diachronic generative approach. It contextualizes the chapters in this volume against the background of this literature, and groups them into more theoretical and more empirical contributions, addressing cyclical changes in both the nominal and the clausal domains.

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Julia Moira Radtke, Sich einen Namen machen. Onymische Formen im Szenegraffiti. Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik (= TBL 568), Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2020, 404 S. – ISBN: 978-3-8233-8330-7 (Print) ISBN: 978-3-8233-9330-6 (eBook), Preis: EUR 88,00 (DE Print), EUR 70,40 (DE eBook).