Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation

Abstract

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen's Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction. The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contactinduced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers.

Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change

“…All in all, the programme we have sketched fits neatly with recent calls to take second language acquisition and population structure more seriously in research on syntactic change (e.g. Lucas and Lash 2010;Meisel 2011), factors that have been largely ignored in diachronic generative syntax, despite early seminal works such as Weerman (1993). More generally, it offers a new way to approach one of the most central questions of modern linguistics: the division of labour between the biological and the historical-cultural, the necessary and the contingent, in grammar.…”

“…Hagemeijer 2008). Language contact has long been suspected to be behind several instances of Jespersen's Cycle (Beyer 2009;Lucas and Lash 2010), and has been argued to be responsible for differences in the speed of the transition between stages II and III (Rutten et al 2012;Breitbarth 2014b). This makes Jespersen's Cycle an ideal testing ground for our hypothesis.…”

The typology of negation across varieties of Arabic

“…There is no reason to make any of these assumptions a priori, however. As argued at length by Lucas & Lash (2010), the proponent of a purely internal account of Jespersen's cycle in Arabic needs to explain the geographical distribution of bipartite negation in the contemporary dialects: if the grammaticalization took place in Egypt at the end of the first 25 These include: that purely postverbal negation with -š predates bipartite negation with mā…-š; šayʾ 'thing' derives from the indefinite determiner use of šī, not vice versa; and all these forms derive ultimately from the Proto-Semitic 3rd person pronouns based on s 1 (*[s]). 26 Jespersen's cycle is the name given to a crosslinguistically common diachronic process whereby an original negator is joined by a newly grammaticalized form in a bipartite construction, with the original negator then typically being omitted or lost altogether, so that the new element then suffices as the sole expression of negation (see Breitbarth, Lucas & Willis 2020).…”

“…Diem is silent on this point. The answer given by Lucas & Lash (2010) is that what was special about Egypt at this time was the presence of large number of native speakers of a language with bipartite negation (Coptic) learning Arabic as a second language and interpreting the structures they found there as evidence for bipartite negation, in a way that native acquirers of Arabic in Egypt and elsewhere had not, up to that point. This line of argument is reinforced by the presence of bipartite negation in the southern Arabian Peninsula, where there is a history of contact with the Modern South Arabian languages, the mainland varieties of which have also undergone Jespersen's cycle.…”

Arabic-Berber-Songhay contact and the grammaticalisation of ‘thing’

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Arabic-Berber-Songhay contact and the grammaticalisation of "thing"Lameen SouagThe development of double negation in Arabic has attracted increasing attention in recent years (Lucas & Lash 2010;Wilmsen 2014;Diem 2014). The striking parallels between negation in Berber and North African Arabic invite an explanation in contact terms, and such explanations have indeed been proposed (Lucas 2010; Lucas 2013) and disputed (Brugnatelli 2014).

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