Jespersen's Cycle

Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics, which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The term originated in the 1979 publication Typology of Sentence Negation by Swedish linguist Östen Dahl. Dahl coined it in recognition of the pioneering work of Otto Jespersen in identifying this pattern of language change.The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word.jeonedis.(Old French)jeo ne dis.jenedispas.(modern standard French)je ne dis pas.jedispas.(modern colloquial French)je dis pas. Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics, which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The term originated in the 1979 publication Typology of Sentence Negation by Swedish linguist Östen Dahl. Dahl coined it in recognition of the pioneering work of Otto Jespersen in identifying this pattern of language change. The linguist Otto Jespersen began his book Negation in English and Other Languages with the words: