Introduction to the special issue: “Jespersen revisited: Negation in Romance and beyond”

Abstract

This special issue of LINGUA assembles five selected papers presented at the conference "Negation and Clitics in Romance" (University of Zurich, February 24 th and 25 th 2012) which focus on diachronic variation in the expression of (sentential) negation, widely known as the Jespersen cycle. The volume contains one paper on Italoromance, two on French, and two on Dutch, which ensures a certain comparative aspect. The morphological exponents of sentential negation are one of the most prominent examples of "cycles" in the diachrony of human languages (see e.g. van Gelderen 2009, 2011). Linguistic cycles are defined, in general, as linguistic changes "where a phrase or a word gradually disappears and is replaced by a new linguistic item" (cf. van Gelderen 2009:2). The so called Jespersen cycle, named after the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen 1 (cf. Jespersen 1917, 1924), describes the evolution of sentential negation as it has taken place or is currently taking place in many Indo-European languages such as English, French (cf. Larrivée/Ingham eds. 2011), and German (cf. Jäger 2008) as well as other Romance, Germanic, and Slavic varieties (negative cycles have been described e.g. for Russian, cf. Tsurska 2009, and Afrikaans, cf. Biberauer 2009). The Jespersen cycle involves the phonetic weakening of a preverbal negative marker, which tends to be doubled by a second postverbal element (such as Latin/French PASSUM > pas 'step', MICAM > mie 'crumb', GUTTAM > goutte 'drop' or PUNCTUM > point 'point'). These items, called minimizers, express small quantities and are seen initially as reinforcements of the first negative marker. Later on, they acquire an independent negative meaning and express sentential negation, first in co-occurrence with the former negative, and then alone, as the former negative is first cliticized and then lost in most cases. In light of some recent descriptions of the negative cycle (cf.

Cyclical change continued

“…As for (4di), we have some sense what keeps the negative cycle going. As was mentioned above, because negatives are so important in language, pragmatic strengthening is frequent and this stimulates new forms next to pragmatically weaker ones (see also Meisner et al 2014). Modal cycles are also omnipresent, as e.g.…”