Regional Variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen's Cycle stage II -bipartite ne + not -to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen's Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.

Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change

“…stage III That is, at stage II of Jespersen's Cycle, regardless of finer distinctions between proposals in points of detail, the crucial property for the current paper is that the original negative marker is a syntactic head with an uninterpretable negation feature [uNeg]. In a monolingual community/community with only child L1 acquisition, this [uNeg] (Wallage 2005(Wallage , 2017Walkden and Morrison 2017). Dutch, on the other hand, remained in stage II all through Middle Dutch (c. 1150-1500), and only started to give up the old preverbal marker around 1650 in the northern provinces (Burridge 1993), while southern dialects only started to lose it in the nineteenth century (Beheydt 1998), and many Flemish dialects still preserved it until the end of the twentieth century (e.g.…”

“…However, since the crucial Penn Parsed Corpus of Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 2000) is based on prose texts and the geographical distribution of these texts is extremely patchy during the course of the change, dialectal differences in negation are difficult if not impossible to assess using this resource (Wallage 2005: 229, 238). Walkden and Morrison (2017) investigate the change to Stage III using a different resource, the near-exhaustive Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, which covers the period 1150-1325 (Laing 2013-). They find that Stage III emerges first in texts from the East Midlands, Yorkshire, and East Anglia (see Figure 2).…”

“…On the face of it, this fits neatly with our hypothesis. There is, however, an important confounding factor: Norse had already undergone the shift to Stage III during the pre-textual period (Eythórsson 2002), and so another possible scenario is syntactic transfer from Norse to northern Middle English, as Walkden and Morrison (2017) suggest. It may be that both transfer and simplification are at work as processes here, but it is not possible to distinguish the two empirically.…”