The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Grammaticalization and grammar change 305actual grammaticalization (or rather, the grammatical reanalysis leading tofurther grammaticalization). The trigger must be found in the word orderchange and the resulting juxtaposition of have and the infinitive.9.3.2 Jespersen’s cycle in the history ofEnglishIn his 1917 work Negation in English and other Languages, OttoJespersen made his seminal observations on the cyclical development ofsystems of sentential negation. His negative cycle can be summarized asfollows:(18) i. negation is expressed by one negative markerii. negation is expressed by a negative marker in combination with anegative adverb or noun phraseiii. the second element in stage (ii) takes on the function of expressingnegation by itself; the original negative marker becomes optionaliv. the original negative marker becomes extinctJespersen’s negative cycle looks like a textbook case of grammaticalization:negative adverbs undergo semantic bleaching and morphosyntactic reduction,up to a point where a new negative adverb is introduced, apparently becausethe old form is worn out as a linguistic sign. Once this new element is introduced,the old one disappears altogether, upon which the new sign shows thefirst traces of weakening. And so on. In what follows, this historical cycle willbe discussed and illustrated in detail for English. From the point of view ofthe theoretical issues surrounding grammaticalization, it is of particular interestto look at negation. The fact that the lexical meaning of negative adverbsthemselves is fairly straightforward, allows for relatively tight control over therole of semantic change. As a result, we can get the role of syntax and morphologymore sharply into focus. We will see that this role is very substantial,and can be analysed very precisely.We will also see that the sentential structure that has recently come to beadopted in the Principles and Parameters framework, in which negation isrepresented in a separate phrase according to the standard X phrase structureformat, yields a particularly insightful account of this sequence of changes.Once this analysis is in place, we will see that the history of sentential negationin English is a pure case of morphosyntactic change, which can beregarded as semantically driven only in the sense that the meaning of negativeadverbs is weakened over time. But the force that structures this sequence ofchanges through a millennium of development is the phrase structure formatin which negation is expressed. Let us now first make explicit our assumptionsfor the structural representation of negation before we go on to discuss thehistorical evidence.