Jespersen's cycle

Jespersen's cycle is a series of processes in the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, to a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases to 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 1979.

The linguist Otto Jespersen began his book Negation in English and Other Languages (1917):^[1]

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 process has since been described for many languages in many different families, and is particularly noticeable in languages which are currently at stage II (as described below) 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 the Swedish linguist Östen Dahl, writing in his 1979 article "Typology of sentence negation", to name the process "Jespersen's cycle".^[2] The observation widely attributed to Jespersen was however made earlier, most notably by Antoine Meillet, who in 1912 wrote in the context of diachronic change in some Indo-European languages of the expression of negation:

Languages thus follow a kind of spiral development: they add accessory words to obtain an intense expression; these words weaken, are reduced and fall to the level of mere grammatical tools; new words are added, or different words are added for the sake of expression; the weakening starts again, and so on without end.^[a]

Jespersen explained the causation of these changes. In summary:^[1]

The negative adverb very often is rather weakly stressed, because some other word in the same sentence receives the strong stress of contrast – the chief use of a negative sentence being to contradict and to point a contrast. The negative notion, which is logically very important, is thus made to be accentually subordinate to some other notion; and as this happens constantly, the negative gradually becomes a mere proclitic syllable (or even less than a syllable) prefixed to some other word. The incongruity between the notional importance and the formal insignificance of the negative (often, perhaps, even the fear of the hearer failing to perceive it) may then cause the speaker to add something to make the sense perfectly clear to the hearer.

As a "somewhat oversimplified"^[b] example from French, there are three stages, labelled I, II and III:^[6]

In Stage I, "Negation is expressed by a single preverbal element":

In Stage II, "Both a preverbal and a postverbal element become obligatory":

In Stage III, "The original preverbal element becomes optional or is lost altogether":

The use of ne on its own survives in certain set expressions (e.g. n'importe quoi 'no matter what/anything') and with certain verbs (e.g. Elle ne cesse de parler 'She doesn't stop talking').

Welsh has a very similar pattern, Ni wn i ddim, lit. 'Not know I nothing'.^[7] In both Welsh and French, the colloquial register is at a more advanced stage in the cycle, and the first part (ne or ni(d)) is very frequently omitted. In formal Welsh registers, by contrast, ni(d) tends to be used without ddim.

Spoken Brazilian Portuguese is also in differing stages of Jespersen's cycle, depending on register and dialect. The original way to form a negative, as in most Romance languages, was the negative adverb não, as in Maria não viu o acidente 'Maria did not see the accident'. This pre-verbal não is usually pronounced in a reduced form, which led to another não being used where negative adverbs usually go: Maria não viu o acidente não. These days, sentences without the initial reduced não can be encountered in colloquial varieties: Maria viu o acidente não.^[8]

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Italian and the various Italian regional languages are also undergoing a similar transformation, where all three stages can be seen in action at once^{[citation needed]}: The standard language is generally at stage I, with e.g. Non gliel'ho detto 'I haven't told him/her', and this form is also customary in colloquial language. Especially in North-Western variants, this can become Non gliel'ho mica detto colloquially, however with a slight difference with respect to pragmatics (stage II), and further be reduced to (stage III) Gliel'ho mica detto (sub-standard and only regionally in some varieties) or Mica gliel'ho detto (colloquial, more widespread, but with identical meaning as stage II), which already presents the form of a stage I in a new Jespersen's cycle. The word mica originally means '(pieces of) soft inside of bread' or 'crumb', similarly to more standard mollica; it then grammaticalised in the meaning 'a little, (in) the least'. It is part of a series of words used in various registers, dialects and time periods in this same context, e.g. punto 'point' or passo '(small) step' (like in French), or also affatto, originally 'in fact, at all', now generally perceived with a negative valence: Non gliel'ho punto detto, Non gliel'ho passo detto, Non gliel'ho detto affatto. In Western Lombard, the archaic no l'hoo vist 'I haven't seen him/it' has long since become l'hoo minga vist or l'hoo vist no with no change in meaning (where minga ≡ it. mica).

English passed through Jespersen's cycle early in its history. Jespersen's own example is of the process leading to I don't say. The first stage was Old English ic ne secge with emphasis optionally added via na, nalles, and noht, the last of which led to the second stage, Middle English I ne seye not. The third, I say not, was reached in the 15th century. What Jespersen calls "the universal tendency to have the subject before the verb (that is, the verb that means something)"^[c] prompted wide use by the Elizabethans of do, leading to the fourth stage, I do not say; and from there we get the fifth, I don't say.^[9]

Or more simply, "I didn't see" would be expressed in Old English as ic ne geseah; then strengthened with the word nauȝt (from Old English nawiht 'no thing') as Middle English I ne ysauȝ nauȝt; then leading to Early Modern English I saw not.^[10][11]

For an expression meaning 'Haraldr does not know', Old Norse had Haraldr ne veit, with ne as the sole negator. The negation was later emphasized by the addition of at or a; using the former, for either Haraldr ne veit-at or ne veit-at Haraldr. For poetry, prosiopesis (clipping of the start) changed the latter to veit-at Haraldr. For prose, the descendants of Old Norse instead used cognates of Old Norse eigi or ekki; so for example Danish came to use ej (now archaic) or ikke, and Swedish to use icke or inte.^[12]

The same development occurred in the other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, which produced their respective postposed negative particles nicht and niet, first duplicating and eventually ousting the original preposed negative particle *ne / *ni.^[13]

The Egyptologist Alan Gardiner wrote as early as 1904 of the historical transformation of pas and point (without any claim of originality for his observation); he noted that the earliest attested use of the Egyptian word

is "as an emphatic adverb in negative sentences", and that it seems likely that, like pas and point, it thereafter lost its emphatic role; both in Egyptian and in Coptic, such words came to express negation.^[14]

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Palestinian Arabic creates negation through suffixation (e.g. /biʕrafɛʃ/ 'I don't know' lit. 'I know not' which comes from an earlier/alternate form of (/ma biʕrafɛʃ/ 'I don't know' lit. 'not I know not').

Central Atlas Tamazight, a Berber language spoken principally in Central Morocco, uses a bipartite negative construction (e.g. /uriffiɣ ʃa/ 'he didn't go out' — the underlined elements together convey the negative) which apparently was modeled after proximate Arabic varieties.^{[15]: 287–288}

The Chamic languages, spoken in parts of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan, may also be undergoing Jespersen's cycle.^[16]

• Breitbarth, Anne, David Willis, and Christopher Lucas (eds.). 2020. The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Volume II: Patterns and Processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199602544
• Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard, and Jacqueline Visconti (eds.). 2014. The Diachrony of Negation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 9789027259257
• Jespersen, Otto (2025) [1917]. Reynolds, Brett; Evans, Peter (eds.). Negation in English and Other Languages. Classics in Linguistics. Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.14843487. ISBN 978-3-96110-500-7.
• Lucas, Christopher (2007). "Jespersen's cycle in Arabic and Berber". Transactions of the Philological Society. 105 (3): 398–431. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968x.2007.00189.x.
• Silvennoinen, Olli O. (2025). "An introduction to Otto Jespersen's Negation in English and Other Languages (1917)". Negation in English and Other Languages. By Jespersen, Otto. Reynolds, Brett; Evans, Peter (eds.). Classics in Linguistics. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. vii–xxiv. doi:10.5281/zenodo.14843487. ISBN 978-3-96110-500-7.
• van der Auwera, Johan (2009). "Chapter 3: The Jespersen Cycles". In van Gelderen, Elly (ed.). Cyclical change. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Vol. 146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 35–71. doi:10.1075/la.146.05auw. ISBN 9789027255297.
• Veselinova, Ljuba & Hamari, Arja (eds.). 2022. The Negative Existential Cycle. (Research on Comparative Grammar 2). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6306474.
• Willis, David, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth (eds.). 2013. The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Volume I: Case Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199602537