Jespersen's cycle
Jespersen's cycle proper noun: 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.
Proper noun
Jespersen's cycle
- 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.
Origin of Jespersen's cycle
Described in 1917 by linguist Otto Jespersen, and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation.
Questions about Jespersen's cycle
- What does Jespersen's cycle mean?
- Jespersen's cycle means 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.
- What part of speech is Jespersen's cycle?
- Jespersen's cycle is a proper noun.
Words near Jespersen's cycle in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Jespersen's cycle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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