How markers of negation may become functionally differentiated during periods of language change
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.
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).