What is it about?
Markers of negation (such as English "not") undergo cyclic replacement and renewal by "Jespersen's cycle". During the intermediate stages of this cycle, multiple such markers of negation exist at the same time. We discuss the processes which drive the cycle, and theorise that during these periods of variation, the multiple markers should gain some kind of functional differentation: they should come to mean slightly different things, or be used in different contexts. We examine one such case, changes in negation in Middle Norwegian, and show that we can indeed see just such functional differentiation.
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Why is it important?
This draws together previous work on the functional differentiation of negation strategies with a diachronic (historical linguistic) understanding of processes of change. It also demonstrates that existing ideas about Jespersen's cycle and the differentiation of negatives do seem to apply to a rather atypical case (usually, Jespersen's cycle involves a stage with "bipartite" negation, expressed with multiple elements such as French "ne ... pas"; the Middle Norwegian case is atypical since there is no such bipartite stage).
Perspectives
This was an enjoyable piece to work on - the data are interesting, and proved conceptually tricky. I hope that readers will find interest in the examples and our discussion of the problems of doing this type of work with historical texts, in addition to the central, theoretical contributions of the paper.
Tam Blaxter
University of Cambridge
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This page is a summary of: Pragmatic differentiation of negative markers in the early stages of Jespersen’s cycle in North Germanic, Diachronica, December 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/dia.16040.bla.
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