Abstract
In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen’s Cycle stage II – bipartite ne + not – to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen’s Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.
References
Allen, Cynthia. 1997. Middle English case loss and the ‘creolization’ hypothesis. English Language and Linguistics 1(1). 63–89. DOI: 10.1017/S1360674300000368
Bech, Kristin & George Walkden. 2016. English is (still) a West Germanic language. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(1). 65–100. DOI: 10.1017/S0332586515000219
Bradley, Henry. 1904. The making of English. London: Macmillan.
Braunmüller, Kurt. 1996. Forms of language contact in the area of the Hanseatic League: Dialect contact phenomena and semicommunication. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 19(2). 141–154. DOI: 10.1017/S033258650000336X
Braunmüller, Kurt. 2002. Language contact during the Old Nordic period I: Within the British Isles, Frisia and the Hanseatic League. In Oscar Bandle, Kurt Braunmüller, Ernst Håkon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann & Ulf Teleman (eds.), The Nordic languages: An international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages, vol. 1, 1028–1039. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110197051-114
Braunmüller, Kurt. 2007. Receptive multilingualism in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages: A description of a scenario. In Jan D. ten Thije & Ludger Zeevaert (eds.), Receptive multilingualism: Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts, 25–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/hsm.6.04bra
Breitbarth, Anne. 2014. Dialect contact and the speed of Jespersen’s Cycle in Middle Low German. Taal en Tongval 66. 1–20. DOI: 10.5117/TET2014.1.BREI
Brooks, N. P. 1979. England in the ninth century: The crucible of defeat. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29. 1–20. DOI: 10.2307/3679110
Buccini, Anthony F. 1992. Southern Middle English hise and the question of pronominal transfer in language contact. In Rosina Lippi-Green (ed.), Recent developments in Germanic linguistics, 11–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.93.04buc
Burchfield, Robert W. 1985. The English language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coetsem, Frans, van. 1988. Loan phonology and the two transfer types in language contact. Dordrecht: Foris.
Coetsem, Frans, van. 2000. A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Dahl, Östen. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17(1–2). 79–106. DOI: 10.1515/ling.1979.17.1-2.79
Dance, Richard. 2012. English in contact: Norse. In Alexander Bergs & Laurel J. Brinton (eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook, vol. 2, 1724–1737. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110251609.1724
Emonds, Joseph & Jan Terje Faarlund. 2014. English: The language of the Vikings. Olomouc: Palacký University Press.
Eythórsson, Thórhallur. 2002. Negation in C: The syntax of negated verbs in Old Norse. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 25(2). 190–224. DOI: 10.1080/033258602321093364
Fischer, Olga. 2013. The role of contact in English syntactic change in the Old and Middle English periods. In Daniel Schreier & Marianne Hundt (eds.), English as a contact language, 19–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511740060.002
Frisch, Stefan. 1997. The change in negation in Middle English: A NEGP licensing account. Lingua 101(1–2). 21–64. DOI: 10.1016/S0024-3841(96)00018-6
Görlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – a creole? In Dieter Kastovsky & Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries, 329–344. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110856132.329
Hadley, Dawn. 1997. “And they proceeded to plough and to support themselves”: The Scandinavian settlement of England. Anglo-Norman England 19. 69–96.
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hogg, Richard M. 2004. The spread of negative contraction in early English. In Anne Curzan & Kimberley Emmons (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language II: Unfolding conversations, 459–482. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110897661.459
Holman, Katherine. 2001. Defining the Danelaw. In James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch & David N. Parsons (eds.), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select papers from the proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, 1–11. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Ingham, Richard. 2006. Negative concord and the loss of the negative particle ne in Late Middle English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42. 77–97.
Ingham, Richard. 2008. Contact with Scandinavian and Late Middle English negative concord. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 44. 121–137.
Ingham, Richard. 2013. Negation in the history of English. In David Willis, Christopher Lucas & Anne Breitbarth (eds.), The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Vol. 1: Case studies, 119–150. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199602537.003.0004
Iyeiri, Yoko. 1992. Negative constructions in selected Middle English verse texts. Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews.
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2001. Negative constructions in Middle English. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press.
Jack, George B. 1978. Negation in later Middle English prose. Archivum Linguisticum 9. 58–72.
Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Høst.
Jespersen, Otto. 1938. Growth and structure of the English language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Johannesson, Nils-Lennart. 2005. Old English versus Old Norse vocabulary in the Ormulum: The choice of third person plural personal pronouns. Ms., Stockholm University. https://www.orrmulum.net/ormproj/info/heore97_rev.pdf
Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. Vocabulary. In Richard Hogg & David Denison (eds.), A history of the English language, 199–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose. 2nd edition. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html
Laing, Margaret. 1997. A fourteenth-century sermon on the number seven in Merton College, Oxford, MS 248. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 98(2). 99–134.
Laing, Margaret. 2002. Corpus-provoked questions about negation in early Middle English. Language Sciences 24(3–4). 297–321. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(01)00035-3
Laing, Margaret. 2013–. A linguistic atlas of Early Middle English. Version 3.2. https://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2_framesZ.html
Laing, Margaret & Roger Lass. 2008–. A linguistic atlas of Early Middle English. Introduction. https://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme_intro_ch4.html
Leslie, Stephen, Bruce Winney, Garrett Hellenthal, Dan Davison, Abdelhamid Boumertit, Tammy Day, Katarzyna Hutnik, Ellen C. Royrvik, Barry Cunliffe, Wellcome Trust Case Consortium 2, International Multiple Sclerosis Genetics Consortium, Daniel J. Lawson, Daniel Fallush, Colin Freeman, Matti Pirinen, Simon Myers, Mark Robinson, Peter Donnelly & Walter Bodmer. 2015. The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population. Nature 519. 309–314. DOI: 10.1038/nature14230
Levin, Samuel R. 1958. Negative contraction: An Old and Middle English dialect criterion. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57(3). 492–501.
Loyn, Henry R. 1977. The Vikings in Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lucas, Christopher. 2009. The development of negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Lucas, Christopher. 2012. Contact-induced grammatical change: Towards an explicit account. Diachronica 29(3). 275–300. DOI: 10.1075/dia.29.3.01luc
Lucas, Christopher. 2014. Contact-induced language change. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 519–536. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315794013.ch24
Lutz, Angelika. 2012. Norse influence on English in the light of general contact linguistics. In Irén Hegedűs & Alexandra Fodor (eds.), English historical linguistics 2010: Selected papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23–27 August 2010, 15–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.325.01lut
Lutz, Angelika. 2013. Language contact and prestige. Anglia 131(4). 562–590. DOI: 10.1515/anglia-2013-0065
McIntosh, Angus, Michael L. Samuels & Michael Benskin. 1986. A linguistic atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McWhorter, John. 2002. What happened to English? Diachronica 19(2). 217–272. DOI: 10.1075/dia.19.2.02wha
Miller, D. Gary. 2012. External influences on English: From its beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654260.001.0001
Mitchell, Bruce. 1994. The Englishness of Old English. In Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray & Terry Hoad (eds.), From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies presented to E. G. Stanley, 163–181. Oxford: Clarendon.
Peters, Hans. 1981. Zum skandinavischen Lehngut im Altenglischen. Sprachwissenschaft 6. 85–124.
Pons-Sanz, Sara. 2007. Norse-derived vocabulary in late Old English texts: Wulfstan’s works, a case study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/nss.22
Pons-Sanz, Sara. 2013. The lexical effects of Anglo-Scandinavian linguistic contact on Old English. Turnhout: Brepols.
Poussa, Patricia. 1982. The evolution of Early Standard English: The creolization hypothesis. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14. 69–85.
Sawyer, Peter H. 1971. The age of the Vikings. (2nd edn.) London: Arnold.
Smits, Caroline. 1998. Two models for the study of language contact: A psycho-linguistic perspective versus a socio-cultural perspective. In Monika S. Schmid, Jennifer R. Austin & Dieter Stein (eds.), Historical linguistics, 1997: Selected papers from the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Düsseldorf, 10–17 August 1997, 377–391. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.164.24smi
Studer-Joho, Nicole. 2014. Diffusion and change in Early Middle English: Methodological and theoretical implications from the LAEME corpus of tagged texts. Tübingen: Francke Verlag.
Sykes, Bryan. 2006. Blood of the Isles: Exploring the genetic roots of our tribal history. London: Bantam.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Townend, Matthew. 2002. Language and history in Viking Age England: Linguistic relations between speakers of Old Norse and Old English. Turnhout: Brepols.
Trips, Carola. 2002. From OV to VO in Early Middle English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/la.60
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Bergen, Linda. 2008. Negative contraction and Old English dialects: Evidence from glosses and prose. Part I. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 109(3). 275–312.
Wallage, Phillip. 2005. Negation in early English: Parametric variation and grammatical competition. Ph.D. dissertation, University of York.
Wallage, Phillip. 2008. Jespersen’s Cycle in Middle English: Parametric variation and grammatical competition. Lingua 118(5). 643–674. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2007.09.001
Wallage, Phillip. 2013. Functional differentiation and grammatical competition in the English Jespersen Cycle. Journal of Historical Syntax 2(1). 1–25.
Winford, Donald. 2003. An introduction to contact linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Winford, Donald. 2005. Contact-induced changes: Classification and processes. Diachronica 22(2). 373–427. DOI: 10.1075/dia.22.2.05win