Jespersen's Cycle 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 pattern was formulated in Otto Jespersen's 1917 book Negation in English and Other Languages, and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation.
Introduction
The linguist Otto Jespersen began his book with the words:
The process has since been described for many languages in many different families, and is particularly noticeable in languages which are currently at stage II (both the original and the additional word obligatory) such as French, Welsh, and some dialects of Arabic and Berber.
The fact that different languages can be seen to be in different stages of the process, and that sometimes, as Jespersen says, the whole process can begin again after renewal, prompted Dahl to name the process "Jespersen's cycle". The observation was however made earlier, most noticeably by Antoine Meillet, who used the term 'spiral'.
The process
There are three stages, labelled I, II and III:
In Stage I, negation is expressed by a single pre-verbal element:
In Stage II both a preverbal and a postverbal element are obligatory:
In Stage III the original preverbal element becomes optional or is lost altogether:
Examples
French is well known to use a bipartite negative, e.g. : "I don't know", . (The second negative element originally had a semantic connection with the verb: originally meant "I don't walk a step".) Welsh has a very similar pattern, , . In both languages, the colloquial register is at a more advanced stage in the cycle, and the first part ( or ) is very frequently omitted. In formal Welsh registers, by contrast, tends to be used without . This is not true of formal registers of modern French, but the use of on its own survives in certain set expressions (e.g. 'no matter what/anything') and with certain verbs (e.g. 'She doesn't stop talking').
English too passed through Jespersen's cycle early in its history: for example "I didn't see" would be expressed in Old English as ; then strengthened with the word (from Old English 'no thing') as Middle English ; then leading to Early Modern English I saw not. The same development occurred in the other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, which produced their respective postposed negative particles and , first duplicating and eventually ousting the original preposed negative particle *ne / *ni.
Modern English's do-support and contraction of “do not” to “don’t” in colloquial speech could be argued as moving English back toward Stage I of Jespersen's Cycle—“I didn’t see”.
Palestinian Arabic creates negation through suffixation (e.g. 'I don't know' ) which comes from an earlier/alternate form of ( 'I don't know' ).
Central Atlas Tamazight, a Berber language spoken principally in Central Morocco, uses a bipartite negative construction (e.g. 'he didn't go out' — the underlined elements together convey the negative) which apparently was modeled after proximate Arabic varieties.
The Chamic languages, spoken in parts of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan, may also be undergoing Jespersen's cycle.