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This chapter provides an overview of the typical pathways for the development of negation, focusing on the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It considers the frequency and causes of Jespersen’s cycle, the emergence of new markers of negation from emphatic constructions that eventually come to replace the original marker of negation. It looks at the sources of new negative markers, from minimizers (‘not a bit’) and generalizers (‘not in any possible way’) and at the historical progress of the negative cycle that has occurred in almost every language in western Europe, showing considerable differences in detail despite overall commonality. The chapter also considers how expression of negative indefinites (e.g. ‘nothing, nowhere’) changes over time, including changes in negative concord systems. Common developments here include, for instance, the tendency for items to become more ‘negative’ (the quantifier cycle) and for free-choice items (‘anything you like’) to spread into negative contexts.

This chapter discusses the Greek negator transformations in relation to Jespersen’s Cycle. The developments of NEG1 and NEG2 in Greek do not properly qualify as instances of Jespersen’s Cycle in the traditional understanding of the phenomenon, as it did not manifest a doubling stage. A new approach for Jespersen’s Cycle is proposed, which accommodates not only Greek, but also various other atypical languages that deviate in one way or another from the traditional morphosyntactic description of the phenomenon. It is proposed that Jespersen’s Cycle is a diachronic phenomenon whose regularities are to be found in the semantics. An overview is also provided of the diachronically stable functions of NEG2, which are the COMP-related functions of NEG2 μη‎. It is argued that NEG2 μη‎ did not eventually renew, because of the inertial pressures of its several nonnegative functions, which, being nonnegative, were not affected by Jespersen’s Cycle phenomena.

This chapter gives a minimalist analysis of the development of clausal negation in Welsh. It attests the familiar Jespersen's Cycle with negation: The Modern Welsh negative marker ddim descends from the Middle Welsh noun dim ‘thing’, which co-occurred as a minimizer with the original negative particle ny(t) before eventually replacing it. The chapter takes on the important question of the apparent gradualness of these developments, always a challenge to acquisition-based accounts of grammatical change. It argues that the ‘cycle’ in fact decomposes into a series of stages, with the crucial stages being those where some children reanalyze dim as an adverb, then as a polarity adverb, and finally as the bearer of the uninterpretable [Neg] feature in the clause. The switch in the locus of this feature brings a distinctively minimalist flavour to the analysis of an important diachronic pattern.

This chapter explains the main negation markers in the history of German are the neg‐particles ni/ne (Neg°), ni(c)ht (SpecNegP), and n‐words. It also details the ratio of these and their co‐occurrence change diachronically due to phonetic weakening and reinforcement of the neg‐particle and a profound change in the indefinite system. It finds that the underlying syntactic structure remained unchanged.

This chapter is a study of Latin indefinites in direct-negation contexts. These indefinites are interesting from a theoretical point of view because of their extreme dependence on the surrounding structural conditions, and because of the variety of their instantiations in different linguistic systems. Two phenomena of Latin grammar with wide-ranging implications for the development of Romance indefinites are discussed: the syntax of negation and the diachronic pathways followed by indefinites interacting with it. Latin is a Double Negation language, whereas Early Romance exhibits Negative Concord. The study proposes that this typological shift is linked to another major change from Latin to Romance, namely the change from OV to VO. Late Latin is analyzed as a ‘concealed’ nonstrict Negative Concord language, in which restrictions in the use of the ‘old’ negative indefinites emerge, as well as new patterns with (new) negative-polarity items.

This chapter sets out the separate but parallel emergence of new markers of negation in Welsh and Breton, Welsh ddim from an earlier indefinite pronoun ‘nothing’ and Breton ket of unknown origin, and the subsequent erosion of the former marker of negation nid to a prefix d- in Welsh. Interactions with other areas, such as the loss of true negative imperatives, reorganisation of the system of negative concord, and the trend for indefinites to acquire a negative interpretation are also considered, along with issues in the syntactic reconstruction of Common Celtic and language contact between Welsh and English and Breton and French.

This chapter investigates the development of the expression of standard negation in historical Low German. Standard negation is taken to mean (one of) the productive means to reverse the truth value of a proposition in a language. It is shown that Old Low German uses a preverbal particle ‘ni/ne’ to express standard negation, and that it does not yet have a conventionalized reinforcer of the expression of negation, though there are incipient adverbial uses of the (negative) indefinite ‘(n)iowiht’ ‘any-/nothing’. In Middle Low German, the standard negator is ‘nicht’, while the old preverbal particle ‘ne/en’ is no longer capable of expressing negation on its own and soon disappears from negative clauses in the corpus. The present chapter statistically analyses the language-internal and language-external factors influencing this loss.

This chapter investigates some crucial steps in the evolution of the continuations of Latin aliquis ‘some (or other)’ in the Standard Romance languages. These historical developments represent parallel instantiations of the Quantifier Cycle, a process of change involving indefinites which is well-attested crosslinguistically. The guiding hypothesis is that emphatic strengthening is a decisive factor in the Quantifier Cycle, much like what is observed with the development of negation in Jespersen’s Cycle. What the Quantifier Cycle and Jespersen’s Cycle have in common is the fact that focus interacts with the implicatures triggered by the lexical items in certain grammatical contexts (most notably and clearly, negation) and this results in systematic meaning effects that become conventionalized (grammaticalized) in the course of time. In this case study from the history of Romance, the emphatic semantic component leads to a peculiar grammaticalization pattern also involving the syntactic structure of the DP hosting the indefinite.

This chapter traces the expression of negation and negative indefinites from Old High German to the present day. In Old High German, sentential negation was expressed by a preverbal negative particle and there was optional negative concord with negative indefinites. In Middle High German, as in English, the preverbal negator was reinforced and replaced by a new negator, nicht, deriving from a negative indefinite pronoun, and, with negative indefinites, a non-negative-concord grammar emerged, as is the norm in German today.

The main goal of this chapter is critically to address from a comparative perspective some of the most important issues in Romance negation, covering such topics as the source of different types of negators and negative polarity items; the cyclical interaction of reanalysis and analogy in the emergence and grammaticalization of Romance negators; issues surrounding the unidirectional development of Romance negative structures inherent in Jespersen’s Cycle and the discreteness of the three proposed stages; the development and loss of negative concord and the licensing of negative polarity items; the development and specialization of different negative markers in accordance with temporal, aspectual, modal and finiteness distinctions; multiple sentential positions for negation; negative raising; pleonastic negation. Specific topics dealt with include: form(s) and position(s) of the negative marker; Jespersen’s Cycle; postverbal negators (French, northern Italian dialects, Catalan); position of postverbal negators; form of postverbal negators; new preverbal negative markers; interaction between negation and verbal forms; negation and modality; negation and aspect; N-words and negative concord; negation and focus.

This chapter focuses on Jespersen’s cycle and the emergence of pas ‘not’ 〈 ‘step’ as a new marker of negation, considering especially pragmatic constraints on its earlier use (cancellation of presupposition) and the sociolinguistics of the ongoing replacement of bipartite negation (ne…pas) with single negation (pas) in colloquial French. It also looks at the development of French indefinites, which have become restricted to more negative environments (e.g. rien ‘thing’ 〉 ‘anything’ 〉 ‘nothing’).

This chapter traces the historical complexities of the Greek negative system from Ancient Greek to Standard Modern Greek. Throughout its history Greek has two sentential negators. This chapter discusses the best way to characterise the difference between them, arguing that it is more complex than simply a distinction between a standard indicative negator (Ancient Greek ou, Modern Greek dhen) and a subjunctive negator (Ancient Greek mē, Modern Greek min). The shift from ou to dhen (via ouden) as the main negator is traced as a development akin to but distinct from Jespersen’s cycle. Finally, the chapter traces the development of negative concord and negative imperatives in the history of the language.

This chapter presents Low German as an instance of a language having undergone Jespersen’s cycle, and summarizes the status quaestionis, identifying the gaps in the previous research. Essentially, there is no diachronic study yet of the development of negation in historical Low German, looking at both Jespersen’s cycle and diachronic changes in the interaction between negation and indefinites, that spans the entire period of textual attestation from Old Saxon to the end of the Middle Low German period, when written Low German was replaced by High German. Also novel is the systematic study of the diachronic and geographic variation within Middle Low German, based on a corpus of charters and similar dated and localized documents. The chapter furthermore gives background information on historical Low German and the methods used, and it provides an outline of the book.

In this chapter, the development of the expression of standard sentential negation and of the expression of indefinite quantification in the scope of negation in the history of Low German is analysed using the account outlined in chapter 4. The clitic negation particle present at the start of attestation undergoes a lexical split when a new negative marker enters the language: it eventually loses its negation feature in negative clauses once the new marker becomes an unemphatic negator, but becomes a high C-related marker without sentential scope in exceptive clauses. As the new negator only partially matching the features of the n-marked indefinites in Middle Low German, the availability of negative spread, but absence of negative doubling is accounted for. It is shown how formal and functional external motivations restrict the application of the third factor principles, giving rise to the particular time structure of the Low German changes.

The expression of sentential negation follows Jespersen’s Cycle in the history of High and Low German, from a verbal clitic neg-particle (stage I) in the earliest stages of attestation via a bi-partite expression (stage II) to a free adverbial negator (stage III) in the present-day languages. Besides the expression of negation, also the interaction between sentential negation and indefinites in its scope changes, from the original verbal neg-particle co-occurring with n-free indefinites and the neg-particle co-occurring with neg-marked indefinites (Negative Concord) to neg-marked indefinites without a sentential negator, in the wake of the loss of the old neg-particle. Though these developments are largely similar, they happen at different speeds, and differ in points of detail.

This chapter summarises the empirical and theoretical findings of the book and points out their wider significance. The main developments regarding the expression of negation in historical Low German are the grammaticalization of a new negator from a negative indefinite (niouuiht > nicht) (Jespersen’s Cycle), the loss of the original negator ne/en (and its exaptation in exceptive clauses as a C-element), and the changing interaction between the expression of sentential negation and indefinites in its scope (negative concord). The wider significance of the book lies in it being the first large-scale diachronic study of the development of negation in historical Low German, both empirically and theoretically. On the theoretical level, a novel proposal was made to treat the development of negative markers in terms of third-factor principles. The grammaticalization stages of negative markers are characterized by different internal structure affecting their external syntax, combined with a Minimalist feature system.

The labels ‘Old Arabic’, ‘Middle Arabic’, and ‘Neo-Arabic’ used in Arabic linguistics give the impression of a chronological sequence, implying that the oldest form of Arabic is something like the language that was codified as the Arabic of writing in the 8th–10th centuries AD. Not based in any linguistic principles, these labels have tended to channel inquiries into the history of Arabic into narrow, predetermined conclusions, one being that negation in the relatively young dialects of Arabic follows a Jespersen’s Cycle. Yet the Arabic dialects retain many archaic Arabic features, now rare in modern Arabic writing. Furthermore, they exhibit features shared with other Semitic languages that written Arabic lacks, indicating that the dialects, too, are old.