“Jespersen’s Cycle and the Expansion of Periphrastic do in English”.

This paper revisits Jespersen’s Cycle of negation. While most studies on this famous theory concentrate on the shift from ne V through ne V not to V not, the present study focuses on the later development of negative constructions in English, namely the shift from V not to do not V (and subsequently to don’t V).

The discussion is based on the analysis of (1) the data from 1600 to 1749 of the Archer Corpus (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) (ver. 3.2), which consists of British English only (605,262 words); and (2) the entirety of the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), which again consists of British English (1,193,385 words).

The concluding remarks of this paper includes: “As argued above, Jespersen’s Cycle is a mechanism to keep balance between weaker and stronger forms of negation rather than the constant weakening or strengthening of negation”. (p. 129)

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko and Mariko Fukunaga. 2023. “A Corpus-based Analysis of Negation in Selected 19th-century American Missionary Documents in Honolulu”, in Language and Linguistics in a Complex World, ed. Beatrix Busse, Nina Dumrukcic, and Ingo Kleiber, pp. 133-151. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Negation in Benjamin Franklin’s Writings: A Stylistic Analysis of his Autobiography and Letters”, in Proceedings of the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018), Takamatsu, Japan, September 17-19, ed. Yukio Tono and Hitoshi Ishihara, pp. 178-183. (Downloadable PDF)
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi & Yasumasa Baba. 2015. “Negation and Speech Style in Professional American English”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 54: 181-204.
• Yoko Iyeiri. 2001. Negative Constructions in Middle English. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press.