Table Of ContentThe Evolution of Negation
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 235
Editor
Volker Gast
Founding Editor
Werner Winter
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
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Niina Ning Zhang
Editor responsible for this volume
Volker Gast
De Gruyter Mouton
The Evolution of Negation
Beyond the Jespersen Cycle
edited by
Pierre Larrive´e
Richard P. Ingham
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-023860-0
e-ISBN 978-3-11-023861-7
ISSN 1861-4302
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The evolution of negation : beyond the Jespersen Cycle / edited by
PierreLarrive´e,RichardIngham.
p.cm.(cid:2)(Trendsinlinguistics:studiesandmonographs;235)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-3-11-023860-0(alk.paper)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general (cid:2) Negatives. 2. Polarity
(Linguistics) 3. Grammar, Comparative and general (cid:2) Syntax.
4.Semantics. I.Larrive´e,Pierre. II.Ingham,Richard.
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Table of contents
Is there a Jespersen cycle?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Pierre Larrive´e
Negative words and related expressions: A new perspective on some
familiar puzzles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Theresa Biberauer & Ian Roberts
Negative words and negation in French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Marie Labelle
Secondary negation and information structure organisation in the
history of English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Ans van Kemenade
Looking high and low for NegP in early English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Eric Haeberli
Ne-drop and indefinites in Anglo-Norman and Middle English. . . . 145
Richard Ingham
Looking at Middle English through the mirrorofAnglo-Norman. . . 165
Jack Hoeksema
Ne-absence in declarative and yes/no interrogative contexts:
Some patterns of change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
France Martineau
The early absence of the French negative marker ne . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Paul Rowlett
Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-parametric approach to
negative concord. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Viviane De´prez
Viviane De´prez: ‘‘Atoms of negation: An outside-in micro-
parametric approach to negative concord.’’ Discussion . . . . . . . . . . 273
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
vi Tableofcontents
Negative polarity and the quantifier cycle: Comparative diachronic
perspectives from European languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
David Willis
Indefinite pronouns, synchrony and diachrony:
Comments on Willis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Johan van der Auwera & Lauren Van Alsenoy
Subject index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Language index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Is there a Jespersen cycle?
Pierre Larrive´e
1. Introduction
Thepurposeofthispaperistopresentareconceptualisation ofthecentral
grammaticalchangethatistheJespersencycle.Theevolutionofthegram-
marofnegationisproposedtobebestunderstoodaspathwaysofchanges
for (families of) items rather than as a syntactically-driven process. The
paper does three things. It first introduces the research project from which
emanate the contributions to this volume that are subsequently presented.
Itshowshowpathwaysofchangeaccountforthedevelopmentofn-words
and adverbial reinforcements. Defining diagnostics of negative items are
proposed before the argument is summarised in the conclusion.
2. Investigating the Jespersen cycle: Summary of contributions
Some grammatical changes have been argued to proceed in cycles. Proba-
bly the best known and earliest was put forward by Jespersen (1917; for
precursors, see van der Auwera 2009: 6; for a full bibliography of work
on the subject, see the web site of the project Cycles of grammaticali-
zation). He suggested that there was a cycle of sentential negation such
thatthepreverbalnegativelosessubstanceandisadjoinedbyapostverbal
reinforcement that ends up as the sole expression of negation. This can be
illustrated with the idealised French data provided by Jespersen himself,
with each example corresponding to a new stage of the cycle (on di¤erent
ways of counting stages, see van der Auwera 2009):
(1) Stage 1
Jeo ne dis. (Early French)
1SG NEG say-PR-1SG
‘I don’t say.’
(2) Stage 2
Je ne dis pas. (Middle French)
1SG NEG say-PR-1SG NEG
2 PierreLarrive´e
(3) Stage 3
Je dis pas. (Contemporary informal French)
1SG say-PR-1SG NEG
A new cycle can be started as in French-based Creoles:
(4) New stage 1
Mo pa di. (Cont. Louisiana French)
1SG NEG say-PR-1SG
The major question that this raises is whether this process of language
changeisinevitable.Suchinevitabilityseemstobesuggestedbythenotion
of a cycle, which in itself implies a series of di¤erent stages that lead back
to an initial position. This is implicit in an analysis such as that by van
Gelderen (2011), who sees linguistic cycles as the result of a tension
between principles of economy applying to individual items on the one
hand and on the other to syntactic arrangements. That an orderly move-
ment from preverbal to postverbal negative marking and back again is
found acrossa varietyof unrelatedlanguagesmight point to a mechanism
internaltolanguageorganisation – takinguptheolddebateastowhether
the organisation of languages includes the mechanisms of their own
change as proposed by August Schleicher and challenged by Ferdinand
de Saussure. Should all languages be expected to follow the same trajec-
tories? What external or internal factors might intervene in the history of
particular languages in such a way as to a¤ect outcomes?
ThecausesoftheJespersencycleistheobjectoftheresearchconducted
under the International Network Cycles of Grammaticalization, generously
funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The Network held six seminars from
June 2008 to December 2009 in Birmingham. They reappraised an often
described but seldom explained central grammatical change. The first
particular objective was to propose semantic and syntactic criteria for the
identification of negative items, as the emergence of new negative items
is the condition of the cycle. As the emergence of new negatives impacts
on their ability to be used together in concord configurations, the second
particularobjectivewastoestablishwhetherthehistoryofnegationisbest
accounted for by negative phrases or more recent feature-based analyses
(Brown 1999, Zeijlstra 2004). These helped two general objectives to be
achieved: the advocacy of using new data closer to everyday usage for
earlier periods of well-documented languages, and a dialogue between
formal and functional approaches following an original format of con-
tributions and their discussion.
IsthereaJespersencycle? 3
The exchanges of the seminars culminate in the contributions to this
volume that put forward the reconceptualisation of the Jespersen cycle.
The main articles deal with the themes of sentential adverbial negation
(van Kemenade, Ingham, Martineau), n-words (De´prez, Willis) and nega-
tive concord (Biberauer & Roberts). Thepapersarepresented below before
elements of convergence between them are highlighted.
TheJespersencycleisprimarilyaboutthemovefrompreverbaltopost-
verbal negative items. Going back to Indo-European roots, the preverbal
marker is lost in most Germanic languages early on. The period when
English still had a preverbal markers is what Ans van Kemenade analyses.
Shelooksatnewdatainordertoestablishwhatthesyntacticcontribution
of Old English na is. It can be found in two syntactic positions. One is a
high position that is situated above the tense phrase in root clauses. This
high position seems to correlate with discursive functions associated with
presupposed propositions. The other is a low position below TP that is
targeted in non-root clauses. As syntactic di¤erences between root and
non-root clauses are lost with the decline of the second-position verb
constraint, so is the higher position, and the preverbal marker is then
restricted to one dependent syntactic position that may explain why it
was lost.
The loss of the preverbal marker in Middle English is what is con-
sidered by Richard Ingham. He raises the point that the crucial period
between 1240 and 1380 lacks a body of prose, which makes it di‰cult to
track the course of these changes reliably. This lacuna is caused by the
sociolinguistic fact that prose would have been written in Latin or Anglo-
Norman during that period. It is therefore the legal prose of that variety
of French that Richard Ingham examines to find traces of influences
from changing Middle English. One such change is the loss of the prever-
bal negative. Ne-drop is found in late thirteenth century, with indefinites
such as onc ‘never’, rien ‘nothing’ and nul ‘none’ expressing negation by
themselves. The first cases of post-verbal negation pas without ne are re-
corded in the 1340s. The loss of the preverbal negator in Anglo-Norman
thusprovidesindirectevidenceforthechronologyofchangefortheEnglish
negative, and explains why in this respect Anglo-Norman appears more
advanced than its continental counterpart, from which it di¤ers little,
syntactically, up to the late 1360s.
TheprogressivelossofneinFrenchsincetheClassicalperiodismapped
out by France Martineau. She considers literary and non-literarydata that
reflect social stratification, using notably corpora of letters produced by
partially literate writers. These sources present data both from the Old as
