Jespersen cycle
The Jespersen cycle is a language change model in historical linguistics that describes the development of negation particles . The model was first presented in 1917 by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in his book Negation in English and Other Languages . The name after Jespersen was coined in 1979 by the Swedish linguist Östen Dahl .
The Jespersen cycle describes the historical development of a negative expression of a simple, the verb preceding mark of negation, a non-contiguous mark (components of the marking, and after the verb) to, in some cases, a subsequent loss of the prefix portion the marking (see illustration). As Jespersen put it:
“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. "
“The history of negative expressions in different languages allows us to observe the following strange fluctuation: The original negative adverb is first weakened, then perceived as inadequate and therefore reinforced, usually by an additional word, and this in turn can be perceived as the actual negative and then over time go through the same development as the original word. "
Since the process can repeat itself as Jespersen notes, Dahl spoke of a "cycle". Other linguists had made this observation before, including Antoine Meillet , who used the term 'spiral'. However, the picture of the cycle is also criticized, since the components of the negative expression that acquire a negative meaning in the course of development, as a rule, do not lose it again.
An example in German would be the negation particle “not”, which arose from a clitization of the old high German independent words “ne” and “weight” (cf. also English: nothing , no-thing ), which in the course of the language change became a word with a newer, more abstract semantics (meaning) have collapsed.
Today the Jespersen cycle is particularly interesting against the background of grammaticalization theory.
literature
- Renata Sczcepaniak: Grammaticalization in German . 2nd Edition. Fool, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8233-6666-9 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Otto Jespersen: Negation in English and Other Languages . Høst, Copenhagen 1917 (English, archive.org ).
- ^ Östen Dahl: Typology of Sentence Negation . In: Linguistics . tape 17 , 1979, pp. 79-106 , doi : 10.1515 / ling.1979.17.1-2.79 .
- ^ Pierre Larrivée: Is there a Jespersen cycle? In: Pierre Larrivée, Richard Ingham (eds.): The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle . 2011, p. 1–22 , doi : 10.1515 / 9783110238617.1 (English).