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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 turns to external motivations for Jespersen’s cycle. Given the apparent diffusion pattern of the development in northwestern Europe observed in chapter 2, the current chapter considers the question of whether Jespersen’s cycle was a single innovation that spread through language contact, or whether there were several separate instances of Jespersen’s cycle in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The timing of the changes in the different languages are mapped to the socio-historical situations, leading to the conclusion that in northwestern Europe at least, the trigger of Jespersen’s cycle was much less frequently contact-induced than previously thought. An in-depth case study of three Afro-Asiatic languages in North Africa, however, shows that language contact can lead to the diffusion of Jespersen’s cycle across a wide area. Furthermore, the stability of the transitional stage II may be related to the type of contact situation.

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.

Looking at the changes in the expression of sentential negation in various languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, this chapter presents empirical generalizations about Jespersen’s cycle. The focus lies on incipient Jespersen’s cycle—that is, the factors contributing to the emergence and generalization of new items that have the potential to successfully become new standard expressions of negation. The chapter rejects a teleological view of Jespersen’s cycle and therefore broadens the empirical base by also looking at languages in which there are linguistic elements that seem to fulfil at least some criteria of successful new negative markers, but which nevertheless never reach the next expected step in the development. It furthermore highlights two topics rarely discussed in the literature on Jespersen’s cycle: the comparative speed of the development in different languages and the fate of the original negators after the end of cycle.

This chapter focuses on the language-internal motivations for the processes observed in chapter 2, in particular, the change from negative polarity adverb to negator. The chapter discusses what motivates the actuation of a new postverbal marker or negative quantifier, what obstacles need to be overcome in order to complete this process, and what processes lie behind the loss or exaptation of the original negation markers after such a development. It is argued that both functional and formal factors play a role in explaining the diachronic development of markers of negation in Jespersen’s cycle. In particular, a negation phrase (NegP)-free account making use of economy principles (Minimize Structure and Feature Economy) is proposed to capture the typological and diachronic variation of negative markers.

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 summarizes the volume. It provides a bird's-eye view on the diachronic changes and the accounts developed in the volume. The different strands of research, empirical observations, internal and external motivations for them, and the theoretical accounts are drawn together in a single overview. Furthermore, the chapter offers an outlook beyond the scope of the volume and sketches further lines of research.

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.

This chapter first situates the work against the background of the existing literature. It further introduces the key concepts and terminology used in the volume. After an explanation of the difference between standard negation and sentential negation, the cyclical changes affecting the expression of negation, as well as the typical types of interaction between indefinites and the expression of negation are introduced. Finally, the theoretical framework used in the volume is sketched. As the chapter considers both language-internal motivations for the changes affecting negative expressions and indefinites in the scope of negation, and language-external ones, the theoretical background for both are discussed in separate sections.

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.