411 REFERENCE · Wiktionary
Jespersen's cycle
Reference material by Wiktionary contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
English
Etymology
Described in 1917 by linguist Otto Jespersen, and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation.
Pronunciation
en LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Jespersen's cycle.wav US
Proper noun
en linguistics A process in historical linguistics by which negation is expressed first by a simple preverbal marker, then by a discontinuous marker (with elements both before and after the verb, as in the French fr ne ... pas) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original preverbal marker, and so on.
en eponyms