Jespersen's cycle

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.

Proper noun

Jespersen's cycle

1. (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 ne...pas) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original preverbal marker, and so on.